TRANSNATIONAL TRANSLATION: 

FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN THE TRAVEL WRITING OF  

COOPER, MELVILLE, AND TWAIN 

 

 

 

 

A Dissertation 

Submitted to 

the Temple University Graduate Board 

 

 

 

 

In Partial Fulfillment 

of the Requirements for the Degree 

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

 

 

 

 

by 

Kate Huber 

May 2013 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Examining Committee Members: 

 

Miles Orvell, Advisory Chair, English and American Studies 

James Salazar, English 

Michael Kaufmann, English 

David Waldstreicher, External Member, History, Temple University



 

 

ii 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 

Copyright 

by 

Kate Huber 

2013 

All Rights Reserved 

   

 

  



 

 

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ABSTRACT 

This dissertation examines the representation of foreign language in nineteenth-

century American travel writing, analyzing how authors conceptualize the act of 

translation as they address the multilingualism encountered abroad. The three major 

figures in this study—James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain—all 

use moments of cross-cultural contact and transference to theorize the permeability of the 

language barrier, seeking a mean between the oversimplification of the translator’s task 

and a capitulation to the utter incomprehensibility of the Other. These moments of 

translation contribute to a complex interplay of not only linguistic but also cultural and 

economic exchange. Charting the changes in American travel to both the “civilized” 

world of Europe and the “savage” lands of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres, this 

project will examine the attitudes of cosmopolitanism and colonialism that distinguished 

Western from non-Western travel at the beginning of the century and then demonstrate 

how the once distinct representations of European and non-European languages converge 

by the century’s end, with the result that all kinds of linguistic difference are viewed as 

either too easily translatable or utterly incomprehensible. Integrating the histories of 

cosmopolitanism and imperialism, my study of the representation of foreign language in 

travel writing demonstrates that both the compulsion to translate and a capitulation to 

incomprehensibility prove equally antagonistic to cultural difference. By mapping the 

changing conventions of translation through the representative narratives of three 

canonical figures, Transnational Translation traces a shift in American attitudes toward 

the foreign as the cosmopolitanism of Cooper and Melville transforms into Twain’s 

attitude of both cultural and linguistic nationalism.  



 

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 Page 

ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii 

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. v 

CHAPTER 

1. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER’S  

LINGUISTIC COSMOPOLITANISM ................................................................... 1 

2. EXPANSIONISM AND EXCHANGE  

IN COOPER’S LATER WORKS ......................................................................... 60 

3. FRAUGHT TRANSLATION  

IN MELVILLE’S COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS ............................................... 114 

4. FROM TRAVEL TO TOURISM:  

THE SHIFT AT MID-CENTURY ..................................................................... 182 

5. MARK TWAIN, MASS TOURISM,  

AND AMERICAN NATIONALISM ................................................................. 240 

CONCLUSION:  

THE NEW IMPERIALISTIC COSMOPOLITE ............................................................ 297 

REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................... 319 

 

  



 

 

v 

INTRODUCTION 

Throughout the nineteenth century, the number of Americans traveling to all parts 

of the world increased dramatically, and many of those travelers chose to write about 

their encounters with foreign lands, peoples, and cultures. Regular transatlantic service 

began in 1818, and the growing numbers sailing to Europe included businessmen, clergy, 

students, scholars, writers, and, of course, the wealthy classes who could afford a 

European Grand Tour (Dulles 26-30). At the same time, as the United States’ military 

and commercial interests expanded, the number of American whalers, merchants, and 

scientists visiting the Pacific and other “exotic” places was also increasing.
1
 While many 

American writers struggled to compete economically with the low cost of books pirated 

from England, travel writers could provide something unavailable from cheap British 

reprints—an American perspective on foreign locales (Melton 22). These travel writings 

included not only traditional, non-fictional accounts, but also novels dramatizing the 

experience of an American abroad, and all levels of fictionalized experience in-between. 

Indeed, as one scholar of the genre concludes, “there is no neat division between 

autobiographical and fictional narratives of travel” (Youngs 4).
2
 But however truthful, the 

various forms of travel literature share a common interest in how Americans perceive the 

foreign, and how they reconcile their own cultural identity with the incommensurable 

differences encountered abroad. 

                                                 
1
 The description of this non-European travel is often classified as a “sea narrative.” 

Hester Blum’s The View from the Masthead provides an excellent introduction to the 

significance of the genre. See also Robert Foulke’s The Sea Voyage Narrative. 

2
 Accordingly, I will follow Justin D. Edwards, who takes the broadest possible definition 

of travel literature, including three categories that define a spectrum of fact and fiction: 

“conventional travel narrative,” “hybrid travel text,” and “[t]ouristic fiction” (13). 



 

 

vi 

This project examines the representation, or, in other words, the treatment, of 

foreign language in texts set abroad, with emphasis on the works of James Fenimore 

Cooper, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. An author need not be consciously fixated 

on the issue of language for evidence of his or her attitude toward linguistic difference to 

be evident in the text—although many of the authors I examine will prove to be quite 

interested in language. Encountering linguistic difference is a pervasive experience 

shared by travelers of all kinds. Whether facing an entirely foreign language, or only 

variations in accent or dialect, travel writers must decide both whether and how to 

represent this difference in their accounts. Moreover, most of the authors examined here 

engage in either some kind of translation or representation of translation. Because this 

transference, literally this “carrying across,” of meaning from one sign system to another 

requires that the translator negotiate not only linguistic but also cultural difference, both 

the practice and the concept of translation are concrete and yet particularly fertile subjects 

for examining an author’s ideas about the nature of language, the negotiation of 

difference, and the desirability, or even the feasibility, of cross-cultural exchange. The 

necessary decision to either translate the foreign into more familiar terms or to leave both 

foreign language and culture untranslated presents a new avenue for examining how 

nineteenth-century American authors viewed cultural difference and how they positioned 

their own nation in the world. 

Translation, Travel, and Cultural Difference 

The empirical subject of Transnational Translation is the way travel writers 

present foreign languages in their texts. Although no previous study has undertaken a 

comprehensive account of linguistic difference in nineteenth-century literature of travel, 



 

 

vii 

Lawrence Alan Rosenwald’s examination of how even literature set within the United 

States must account for a variety of dialects and languages provides a framework for 

examining the representation of multilingualism abroad. While some works may directly 

include languages other than standard English, allowing characters to speak just as they 

would in real life, other works use any number of representational methods to give the 

impression of multilingualism without relying on the linguistic knowledge of the reader, 

and still others ignore the existence of other languages entirely and present events as if 

they were occurring in a monolingual world. Rosenwald’s focus on works set within the 

United States not only provides a valuable reading of immigrant literatures, but also 

explores exceptions to the traditional vision of a monolingual America. My focus on 

American literature set outside of the country raises a complementary set of issues. In 

addition to clarifying Americans’ changing assessments of multiculturalism more 

broadly, the readings that compose this study reveal the way traveling Americans 

conceptualized the foreign and saw themselves in relation to other parts of the globe. 

This project will pay particular attention to both the act and the concept of 

translation, examining the many kinds of spatial and cultural transference they involve. 

While not all representations of multilingualism include an act of translation, either real 

or implied, many of them do. In his examination of translation in twentieth-century travel 

narratives, Michael Cronin outlines the varied forms of translation in which a traveler 

might engage: “meet[ing] fellow speakers of their language from a different country 

(intralingual), be[ing] able to communicate some ideas in the foreign language 

(interlingual) but, at other moments, be[ing] completely stymied and have to resort to 

gestures (intersemiotic)” (Across 4). All of these forms of translation make frequent 



 

 

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occurrences the nineteenth-century travel literature I will examine. Furthermore, as 

Lawrence Venuti has shown in The Translator’s Invisibility, the way in which the act of 

translation and the figure of the translator are imagined can reveal much about the extent 

to which “foreignness” is valued in the target culture. Acts of translation, whether 

necessitated by the process of traveling, included within the travel literature itself, or 

undertaken as part of a more scholarly translational practice, are moments when an 

author’s valuation of foreign language and conceptualization of foreignness are laid bare 

for critical inquiry.  

Translation is also a fertile metaphor for theorizing both exchange and 

representation more broadly, including such transpositions as economic trade across 

incommensurable systems of value and the “translation” of reality into any linguistic 

utterance. When translation fails, when a foreign concept has no direct equivalent in the 

target language, the limits of cross-cultural transference can unsettle the seeming 

universality of one’s own language and culture. This is Homi Bhabha’s view when he 

describes how “[c]ultural translation desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural 

supremacy” (327). Because there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between 

words in different languages, translation reveals that the way language groups meaning 

into concepts can be arbitrary, and that one’s own cultural concepts, once taken for 

universals, are not so. The resulting unsettling of cultural authority, or undermining of 

linguistic certainty, can serve as a tool of resistance, as will be particularly evident in 

Melville’s descriptions of the South Seas. A frank exposure of the sometimes 

incommensurable difference of “savage” language and culture can expose the contingent 



 

 

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arbitrariness of Western systems of knowing, although too strong a belief in the Other’s 

incomprehensibility can be another justification for oppression.  

The most comprehensive study of the figure of translation in the long nineteenth 

century is Colleen Glenney Boggs’s Transnationalism and American Literature. Boggs 

argues that, in contrast to the “monolingual ontology” she finds in the works of 

Hawthorne, writers she identifies as transnational “understood American literature as a 

form of writing that was always in translation” (6-7). She examines how these writers 

negotiate the relationship between America and the world through linguistic difference 

and exchange.
3
 Boggs makes a persuasive argument for the pervasiveness and the 

theoretical importance of both the act and the concept of translation in American 

literature, but while she sees translation as a liberatory practice, Eric Cheyfitz reveals its 

darker side in another major study of translation and the Americas, The Poetics of 

Imperialism. Cheyfitz argues that “translation was, and still is, the central act of European 

colonization [and] imperialism in the Americas,” revealing how translation, particularly 

the translation of “savage” languages and cultures, need not involve a recognition and 

negotiation of cultural difference, but may instead be a means of effacing it (104). 

While Boggs and Cheyfitz have focused on the power of translation to either 

consolidate ideological power or to resist it, I am more interested in how authors 

conceive the act of translation than in the political uses to which translation is put. In 

other words, my primary subject is how writers and texts imagine the permeability of the 

language barrier. In their own ways, each of the authors included in this study responds to 

                                                 
3
 I share Boggs’s interest in Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe (see my Chapter 

Four), but otherwise, she focuses on works set within the United States. 



 

 

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what Jacques Derrida describes as the implicit paradox generated by the story of Babel. 

Derrida examines “the origin of the confusion of tongues, the irreducible multiplicity of 

idioms, the necessary and impossible task of translation,” viewing “its necessity as 

impossibility” (171). In other words, the difference between languages is what requires 

translation, but it is also the very thing that ensures no translation ever can be perfect. 

Where exactly between perfection and impossibility the act of translation lies is a matter 

for debate. Examining the empirical evidence of how foreign language appears in works 

of travel literature allows American perspectives of foreignness to be compared on a 

fairly straightforward continuum of attitudes—a spectrum along which the mean lies 

somewhere between complete permeability and impermeability, between the perfection 

of translation and its impossibility. 

In my model, the assumptions of both permeability and impermeability each have 

two variations, one tending toward a prejudicial extreme and the other toward a more 

enlightened mean. If one sees the barrier between languages as permeable, this may result 

in the conviction that cultural differences are easily assimilated into one’s own 

monolithic viewpoint. Conversely, the assumption of permeability may lead to a desire 

for cross-cultural understanding and exchange. Likewise, imagining that the language 

barrier is less permeable may also result in two opposing attitudes. On one hand, the 

acknowledgement that any translation from one language to the next is less than 

straightforward can indicate an enlightened recognition of cultural difference. But on the 

other hand, the view that cross-cultural understanding is impossible can lead to a position 

of cultural isolationism. At either extreme lies cultural ignorance, one from capitulation 

to the utter incomprehensibility of the foreign and the other from the assumption of 



 

 

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universality. The golden mean between these two points, or perhaps (in a Derridean 

sense) the supplementary acceptance of both positions at once, may be described as a 

kind of cosmopolitanism, as will be discussed below, but such an attitude always risks 

slipping into one prejudicial extreme or the other. Yet the linguistic, cultural, and 

monetary translations necessitated by both travel and travel writing require some 

negotiation of the language barrier, and the attitudes toward cultural difference this 

negotiation reveals will be the subject of the following chapters. 

 

Like the act of translation, travel too can put the previously monolithic authority 

of one’s own culture into conflict with foreign differences. The experience of foreign 

travel fosters the same experience of the “unheimlich” that Bhabha attributes to the 

“cultural authority” of colonialism (195). Bhabha explains: 

Culture is heimlich, with its disciplinary generalizations, its mimetic 

narratives, its homologous empty time, its seriality, its progress, its 

customs and coherence. But cultural authority is also unheimlich, for to be 

distinctive, significatory, influential and identifiable, it has to be 

translated, disseminated, differentiated, interdisciplinary, intertextual, 

international, inter-racial. (195) 

It may be easy to maintain both the primacy and the logical unity of one’s own culture at 

home, but in a foreign context (even in the seemingly powerful position of colonizer), 

contact with the Other disrupts the uncomplicated and homely unity of culture, making it 

uncanny and potentially threatening. This same feeling of the unheimlich occurs in the 

many forms of exchange occasioned by foreign travel: not only cross-cultural 

communication, but also economic exchange and, when the traveler is faced with new 

beliefs and customs, cultural exchange as well. The act of leaving home disrupts the 

hegemony of monolithic culture with the un-homely uncanniness of cultural difference. 



 

 

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Indeed, James Clifford calls travel “an increasingly complex range of experiences: 

practices of crossing and interaction that [trouble] the localism of many common 

assumptions about culture” (3). The foreignness perceived by travel writers resists 

assimilation into the unitary language of monolithic cultural ideology. Whatever the 

traveler’s imagined or intended relationship to the differences encountered abroad, 

travel’s “translation” of the traveler’s body, language, and ideology turns the comforting 

certainty of the traveler’s own culture into something uncanny, uncomfortable, and 

uncertain.  

Many previous studies of travel literature have focused either on European travel, 

tracing the shift from Grand Tour to tourism, or on American imperialism and the travel 

to “uncivilized” parts of the globe that it has occasioned. Others have either examined 

how writers characterize particular locations (such as Italy, the Pacific, or the Levant), or 

have focused more generally on travel writing as a reflection of national identity.
4
 In 

                                                 
4
 Foundational studies of American travel writing include Cushing Strout’s The American 

Image of the Old World, Foster Rhea Dulles’s Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of 

European Travel, William W. Stowe’s Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-

Century American Culture, Terry Caesar’s Forgiving the Boundaries: Home as Abroad 

in American Travel Writing, and Larzer Ziff’s Return Passages: Great American Travel 

Writing 1780-1910. Works that examine travel writing and American imperialism include 

Bruce A. Harvey’s American Geographics, Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the 

Making of U.S. Culture, Christopher McBride’s The Colonizer Abroad, and Susan 

Castillo and David Seed’s collection, American Travel and Empire. Justin D. Edwards’s 

Exotic Journeys is one notable exception to the usual separation of European and non-

European travel literature, as are the studies by Ziff and Caesar. Conversely, books that 

focus on a particular location are far more numerous. Helen Barolini, Leonardo 

Buonomo, Annamaria Formichella Elsden, and Nathalia Wright all examine travel to 

Italy. David Farrier, Paul Lyons (American), and Vanessa Smith study travel to the 

Pacific. Hilton Obenzinger and Brian Yothers (Romance) look at Americans in the Holy 

Land. Phyllis Cole examines England; Pere Gifra-Adroher, Spain; Osman Benchérif, 

Algiers; and Kim Fortuny, Istanbul. Studies of American travel writing that emphasize 

how travel writing consolidated national identity include those of Caesar (44), Harvey 



 

 

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contrast, because some kind of linguistic difference is a constant in all kinds of travel, the 

subject of language allows a broad examination of American travel to diverse parts of the 

world without effacing the differences of each kind of foreignness. In this way, my 

project will examine the inextricable relationship between a sense of self and the 

perception of both Western and non-Western otherness, connecting the differing attitudes 

Americans held toward what they perceived as “savage” and “civilized” cultures. Indeed, 

the constants of multilingualism and translation will demonstrate a convergence of 

Americans’ views of all kinds of foreignness later in the nineteenth century.  

A useful concept for examining a travel writer’s negotiation of self and other is 

Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the “contact zone.” Pratt derives her idea of “contact” from 

the field of linguistics, likening the conflict and confusion of encountering radically 

different peoples to the “improvised” pidgin languages that develop in those situations, 

languages “commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure” (6). Despite 

this negative characterization, such pidgin languages often present the most viable 

compromise between too-easy translation and irreconcilable difference. They are a frank 

if imperfect mediation of linguistic, economic, and cultural systems that would otherwise 

prove incommensurable. By looking at specific moments of linguistic encounter as 

illustrative of broader issues of cultural and economic exchange, I will examine how self-

identity is shaped through a dialectical relationship to otherness, and how a traveler’s 

sense of national identity varies with the foreign land to which he or she travels.  

 

                                                                                                                                                 

(3), William Stowe (xi), Judith Hamera and Alfred Bendixen (1), Jeffrey Alan Melton 

(20), and Mark Simpson (xxvi).  



 

 

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In characterizing American views of the foreign, this project will trace three 

major attitudes toward cultural difference: colonialism/imperialism, nationalism, and 

cosmopolitanism. These terms, and the wide variety of views that might be gathered 

under them, all have specific if complex historical and geographical significances. While 

I will discuss many of these histories throughout the following chapters, the concepts are 

also useful for describing particular attitudes toward foreignness made apparent through 

the representation of language but falling outside of specific ideological movements.
5
 

The failure to recognize and respect the often incommensurable differences of the 

foreign is a hallmark of the West’s dark history of colonialism and imperialism. Although 

the United States grew increasingly imperialistic throughout the nineteenth century, 

Americans were rarely colonizers in the strictest sense. Nevertheless, the same 

chauvinistic attitudes toward cultural difference that underpin colonialism proper are 

often present in American accounts of “savage” difference. Paul Lyons calls such 

attitudes the “ignoring, disparaging, misappropriation of native knowledges, protocols, 

and basic definitions . . . the crude Orientalism in and through which colonialism grounds 

its claims and claims its grounds” (American 12). This same Orientalism can be found in 

the writings that document the United States’ expansion into the “uncivilized” world. 

                                                 
5
 It would be unfair, however, to critique the oversimplified ideas of translation found in 

nineteenth-century travel writers without recognizing the difficulty of expressing the 

cultural difference that resists translation. Bhabha provides an indispensable description 

of the complexity, but also the potential power, of understanding cultural difference. 

While it is frequently clearest and most efficient to refer to a different “culture,” it is 

important to recognize Bhabha’s claim that “the meaning and symbols of culture have no 

primordial unity or fixity” (55). Cultural difference is often experienced as “the 

momentous, if momentary, extinction of the recognizable object of culture in the 

disturbed artifice of its signification, at the edge of experience” (179-80). Accordingly, 

the cultural difference that resists translation is what Melville might call an “ungraspable 

phantom,” a slippage of meaning that can be neither fixed nor contained.  



 

 

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Indeed, as many critics have previously explored, travel writing plays a key role in 

consolidating the dichotomy between self and other on which the discourse of both 

colonialism and imperialism depends.
6
 While I will most often use the terms 

“imperialist” or “expansionist” to describe such cultural chauvinism, these views often do 

not much differ from the attitudes of “colonialism” that postcolonial theory seeks to 

rewrite. 

Underpinning the Orientalism of American expansionist policies, as well as the 

attitudes of colonialism proper, is a dual, if paradoxical, desire to both emphasize 

difference and to efface it. Bhabha compares this duality to Freud’s description of the 

sexual fetish. For Bhabha, the encounter with cultural difference is like a Freudian child’s 

first apprehension of sexual difference; both experiences entail “a ‘play’ or vacillation 

between the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity . . . and the anxiety associated 

with lack and difference” (106-107). Racial stereotypes draw on the same drive to both 

assimilate and disavow the Other. David Spurr provides a similar description of the two 

contradictory attitudes of the “paradox of colonial discourse”: “the desire to efface 

difference and to gather the colonized into the fold of an all-embracing civilization” and 

“the desire to emphasize racial and cultural difference as a means of establishing 

superiority” (32). This description of the duality at the heart of racism (or Orientalism) is 

particularly illustrative of the moment of colonial encounter epitomized by Columbus, 

                                                 
6
 For example, Gifra-Adroher, following Said, describes how “travel literature can 

contribute to discourse formation and the construction of the Other” (24). In the 

introduction to the collection Travel Writing, Form, and Empire, Paul Smethurst argues 

that “[t]ravel and travel writing, and the imaginative geographies they conjured, were 

crucial to the discursive formation of empire, especially by their insinuation and 

cementation of crude binaries such as the West/the Rest, attached to which were the 

clearly pejorative formulations of civilised/savage, scientific/superstitious, and so on” (1). 



 

 

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which is a central focus of the second chapter. The colonialist’s perplexing attempts to at 

once claim understanding of an unknown language and, at the same time, to deny that it 

is a language at all demonstrate the contradictory desires for both unity and dominance, 

and explains the typical recourse, in colonialist descriptions of unknown languages, to 

either an affirmation of pre-Babelian universality or the reduction of linguistic difference 

to animal noise. 

Imperialism’s lack of respect for the legitimacy and particularity of cultural 

difference is related to, but not necessary congruent with, a different kind of rejection of 

cultural difference—nationalism’s lack of interest in the foreign altogether. While 

colonialism and imperialism denigrate the Other for being “savage,” nationalism rejects 

difference for the sheer sake of being “not us.” My use of this term is further clarified by 

Pauline Kleingeld’s discussion of the shift from the “older tradition of republicanism,” in 

which “patriotism is the citizens’ commitment to or love for their shared political 

freedom and the institutions that sustain it,” to the nineteenth-century “nationalist 

manner” of viewing patriotism as “unconditional loyalty to one’s own national 

community (taken as a linguistic and/or cultural community)” (21-22). In its early form, 

American patriotism emphasized the political promise of the United States while still 

allowing that the more developed societies of Europe may be superior in other matters. In 

contrast, the later “nationalist” model of patriotism insisted on a preference for 

everything American, not just valuing the political promise of democracy, but preferring 

all of its cultural productions and, more significantly for the present study, maintaining 

the supremacy of American language. While Cooper’s attitudes toward his country 

follow the older, republican model of patriotism, later writers increasingly associated 



 

 

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nationalism with the preference for American language and culture, a trend that is 

epitomized by the travel writings of Twain. 

Throughout this project, I contrast the cultural chauvinism of both imperialism 

and nationalism with the acceptance or understanding of cultural difference that is often 

described as cosmopolitanism.
7
 In her study of Kant’s idea of cosmopolitanism, 

Kleingeld describes what could be considered two aspects of the term, a practical attitude 

toward cultural difference and a political ideal. According to Kleingeld, Kant views 

Germans as “model cosmopolitans” because they “are hospitable toward foreigners, they 

easily recognize the merits of other peoples, they are modest in their dealings with others, 

and they readily learn foreign languages” (1). Kleingeld further defines Kant’s 

cosmopolitanism as “an attitude of recognition, respect, openness, interest, beneficence 

and concern toward other human individuals, cultures, and peoples as members of one 

global community” (1). It is not necessary to avow an articulated theory of 

cosmopolitanism to share this liberal attitude toward difference. Beyond this practical 

attitude of cosmopolitanism, Kant also subscribed to a political ideal, the goal of a 

universal “federation of states” (6).
8
 As the authors examined in this study only rarely 

engage with the more theoretical and idealistic philosophy of cosmopolitanism, I use the 

                                                 
7
 Thomas J. Schlereth defines cosmopolitanism as “an attitude of mind that attempted to 

transcend chauvinistic national loyalties or parochial prejudices in its intellectual interests 

and pursuits,” also characterized by “a readiness to borrow from other lands or 

civilizations in the formation of . . . intellectual, cultural, and artistic patterns” (xi). 

Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen define cosmopolitanism as a “widening of 

consciousness and confrontation with alterity” (4). 

8
 Likewise, Robert Fine and Robin Cohen explain, “Kant argued that the idea of a 

cosmopolitan order required the institution of a league or federation of nations that would 

guarantee with its ‘united power’ the security and justice of even the smallest states as 

well as the basic rights of even the most downtrodden individuals” (140-41). 



 

 

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term, unless otherwise specified, to refer to a general attitude of openness to difference—

whether on a truly global scale or only applied to a particular location of foreignness—

rather than to the political objective.  

Yet, despite its apparent openness to cultural difference, some versions of 

cosmopolitanism tend to slip toward the colonialism or imperialism that such liberality 

might seem to counteract. As Craig Calhoun points out, the “European colonial projects” 

progressing concurrently with the Enlightenment “informed both the development of 

nationalism and that of cosmopolitanism,” and “[t]he cosmopolitan ideals of a global 

civil society can sound uncomfortably like those of the civilizing mission behind 

colonialism” (89, 92). The danger that lies behind many political theories of 

cosmopolitanism is most strongly demonstrated in the philosophy of Anacharsis Cloots, 

whose goal of “the abolition of all states and the establishment of a ‘Universal Republic’” 

required that oppressed peoples abroad be forced “into the world state” before they could 

“learn to recognize their true interests” (Kleingeld 6, 42). This is an important difference 

between Cloots’s aim of abolishing national boundaries and Kant’s ideal of a non-

coercive federation of existing states (63-64). The acceptance of people of different 

cultures can likewise slip into a desire for all the world’s people to share a single culture 

and civilization. Because of this perpetual danger, it is not as oxymoronic as it might 

seem to use the term “cosmopolitan” as a description of open-mindedness toward Europe 

only. Indeed, it is exactly this shortsightedness of what a universal(ly Western) 

community might look like that causes cosmopolitanism to slip into imperialism. Few of 

the works examined in the following chapters address the question of universal 

governance directly—although Melville does reference Cloots in Moby-Dick (121), the 



 

 

xix 

idea of a universal republic in Redburn (169), and cosmopolitanism more broadly in The 

Confidence-Man, which is not examined here—but the tension between cosmopolitanism 

as an acceptance of difference and the drive for universal brotherhood that often effaces 

that difference will reoccur. By examining how nineteenth-century American travel 

writers position themselves, their culture, and their countries in relation to other parts of 

the world, the following chapters will examine the representation of foreign language in 

order to trace the shift from earlier attitudes of cosmopolitanism and imperialism to the 

end of the century’s overarching nationalism. 

Language in Nineteenth-Century America 

This project’s examination of foreign language and travel is part of a larger 

history of the study as well as the conceptualization of language in the United States. As 

Werner Sollors’s anthology Multilingual America demonstrates, North America has been 

the home of a vibrant and varied multilingualism since its first colonization, and indeed 

before. My focus, however, is on the acquisition of additional languages by native 

speakers of English. While most of the authors examined here will deal primarily if not 

exclusively with modern foreign languages, the history of language learning in America 

must begin with Latin and Greek. As Gerald Graff describes, classical languages were the 

mainstays of a college curriculum well into the nineteenth century (22). At lower levels 

of education, private schools designed to prepare young scholars for college followed this 

classical emphasis.
9
 But the intensive focus on the classics did not accomplish its own 

                                                 
9
 Siobhan Moroney, in “Latin, Greek and the American Schoolboy,” describes the divide 

between private schools, which taught Latin to boys whose well-off families expected 

them to attend college, and public schools, which focused on the English-language 

competency deemed more relevant to a practical profession (305-306). Likewise, L. 



 

 

xx 

aim, and “few students came out of it actually able to read Greek or Latin” (Graff 33). As 

evidenced by the shortcomings of classical education, formal schooling’s characteristic 

failure to instill any kind of real fluency is one reason Transnational Translation will 

focus on languages acquired either by private study or by immersion abroad. 

In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin critiques the traditional pedagogical 

preference for classical languages: 

We are told that it is proper to begin first with the Latin, and having 

acquir’d that it will be more easy to attain those modern Languages which 

are deriv’d from it . . . . It is true, that if you can clamber & get to the Top 

of a Stair-Case without using the Steps, you will more easily gain them in 

descending: but certainly if you begin with the lowest you will with more 

Ease ascend to the Top. . . . [And if students] should quit the study of 

Languages, & never arrive at the Latin, they would however have aquir’d 

another Tongue or two that being in modern Use might be serviceable to 

them in common Life. (97) 

Despite both the aptness of Franklin’s metaphor and the practicality of his priorities, such 

dissent from the traditional philosophy of formal schooling and higher education had 

little effect on educational policy. Calls for reform of higher education’s almost exclusive 

focus on Greek and Latin grammar were silenced by the 1828 Yale Report, which 

“reasserted the primacy of the classics in instilling ‘mental discipline’” (Graff 22). As 

Graff points out, secondary subjects such as modern languages “were frequently offered 

in the last two years [of college], but usually only as electives for which most students, 

preoccupied as they were with classical requirements, had little time” (22). In his study of 

                                                                                                                                                 

Clark Keating explains that, while Eastern preparatory schools tended to imitate the 

colleges in language as in other aspects of the curriculum, “high schools took to 

languages slowly” and “the normal schools, agricultural and mechanical colleges, as well 

as the engineering schools, tended to affirm . . . that there were few reasons for offering 

their students an opportunity to study foreign languages” (37). See also Garrett E. 

Rickard’s “Establishment of Graded Schools in American Cities: I. The English 

Grammar School.”  



 

 

xxi 

college literary and debating societies in the nineteenth century, Thomas S. Harding 

mentions several examples of college societies and society libraries that emphasized 

foreign language works, but many were devoted to political or philosophical debates or to 

literature written in English (69-75). In general, it appears that such societies may have 

offered one avenue for the study of foreign language, but the subject was not widely 

pursued. Thus, with the intensity and difficulty of a classical education, foreign language 

and literature played only a small role in the life of a college student. 

As the century progressed, modern-language courses became increasingly 

prominent in higher education (Keating 37). Charles Hart Handschin’s The Teaching of 

Modern Languages in the United States provides a detailed history of the gradual growth 

of foreign language instruction. He names Amherst as “the first institution of learning in 

America to introduce a thoroughgoing modern language course, instruction in French and 

German there dating from 1824, and in Spanish from 1827” (17). French was taught at 

Harvard as early as 1735, although it did not become “a regular branch of instruction” 

until 1780 (21). Spanish was taught at the university level as early as 1780, and Spanish 

instruction became more frequent (along with Italian) in the 1820s and 30s (84-85). 

German instruction was given at both the University of Virginia and Harvard in 1825 

(35).  

Despite these apparent gains, calls for educational reform at the beginning of the 

twentieth century suggest that the same grammatical emphasis that failed with the 

classics was equally ineffective for teaching modern languages. For example, in a 1916 

book advocating “the direct method” of college language instruction, Carl A. Krause 

entreats the reader, “If you look back upon your own personal experience as students of 



 

 

xxii 

modern languages both in school and at college, you will realize that many students 

failed almost utterly to gain any mastery of the foreign language they were pursuing” 

(66). Indeed, college language requirements have been chronically unsuccessful at 

imparting any real competence in a second language, let alone fluency. Accordingly, 

colleges’ increased emphasis on modern languages near the end of the century suggests, 

more than anything else, that learning such languages had become as specialized and 

academic as studying Latin or Greek. Accordingly, I do not spend much time on foreign 

language instruction as part of a college curriculum, where it is isolated from spoken 

language and thus required, memorized by rote, and forgotten—a characterization of 

college language requirements that has remained strikingly consistent from Royall 

Tyler’s lampooning of his classical education to comedian Father Guido Sarducci’s “Five 

Minute University,” in which two years of college Spanish, after five years of forgetting, 

will yield only “Como está usted. Muy bien.” 

Yet the small role modern languages played in higher education does not mean 

that they were not learned at all. Graff explains that modern languages were not widely 

studied on an academic level because they “were considered mere social 

accomplishments” (37). Despite his deprecatory language, the importance such an 

accomplishment held for the country’s literary, political, and social elite must not be 

underestimated. In many cases, language instruction was imparted by private tutors. For 

example, Robert Francis Seybolt cites several advertisements for Spanish, French, and 

Italian instructors in colonial New York City (275-78). Modern languages were also parts 



 

 

xxiii 

of the curriculum at the secondary level, particularly at private academies.
10

 Citing 

learned examples such as George Ticknor, Henry Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell, 

L. Clark Keating explains, “The second language, or even the third one, when acquired, 

was seen as a pleasant adjunct to an upper-class education, and its presence . . . found an 

adequate basis in purely aesthetic and intellectual considerations” (37). When James 

Fenimore Cooper studied European languages in the early nineteenth century, it was 

precisely in this context. Accordingly, by emphasizing the connection between foreign 

language learning and travel, this study will focus on foreign language acquired willingly 

as a mark of erudition or a vehicle for cross-cultural communication, not foreign 

language instruction when it is only an empty curricular requirement. 

 

Not unrelated to the history of linguistic instruction in America is the question of 

how American authors conceptualized language and the act of translation. A large part of 

this story will be fleshed out in the following chapters, but an overview of language 

theories not directly related to travel is useful here. In Transcendental Wordplay, Michael 

West gives a particularly valuable account of the theories of language most influential in 

nineteenth-century America. One central question for the European philosophers of 

language was the extent to which language was a natural expression of reality. John 

Locke, whose theories of language were perhaps the best known, remained somewhat 

                                                 
10

 From the eighteenth century, French was taught in private academies and boarding 

schools (Handschin 13-14). Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, French instruction 

became increasingly common at the high-school level (26). German was not as common 

as French, but played a major role in Moravian schools in Pennsylvania (51). Spanish 

appears to have been less commonly taught than French or German, but Handschin notes 

several institutions teaching the language in the mid-nineteenth century (83-84). 



 

 

xxiv 

ambivalent about the connection between words and things, but Étienne Bonnot de 

Condillac “postulated an innate language of gesture and facial expression,” a common, 

biological origin for all human communication (M. West 28-29). Charles de Brosses 

stressed the “‘basis of universal language’” even further, arguing that “the essence of all 

language is onomatopoetic imitation” (M. West 32). Thus, De Brosses posited not only 

that all human languages are related, but that they share an inherent connection to the 

reality they describe. While such philosophers often failed to find convincing evidence of 

these universal origins in European languages, they suggested that more “primitive” 

languages were closer to the shared and natural origin of speech and therefore would be 

inherently understandable. In the nineteenth century, the influential rhetorician Hugh 

Blair likewise asserted that, “however barren intellectually, primitive language was 

preeminently natural and poetical” (M. West 46). This romanticized view of “savage” 

language as natural and transparent informs many texts of colonialism and imperialism, 

but, as the following chapters will demonstrate, writers such as Cooper and, even more 

so, Melville will begin to question the inherent universality of “primitive” speech. 

These eighteenth-century theories of language also influenced the 

Transcendentalists. One of the most famous Transcendental theories of language appears 

in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836). In that early tract, Emerson posits an inherent 

connection between words and “natural facts” (48), thus following earlier views that 

locate the origin of language in onomatopoetic imitation. Michael West, however, argues 

that Emerson later modified the extreme philosophy presented in Nature, finding speech 

to be “active, temporal, transitive, bipolar, and creative” rather than confined to natural 

representations (273). As West describes it, this shift served to emphasize the potential 



 

 

xxv 

for creativity within a single language, but Emerson’s later position still falls short of 

cultural relativity. While Emerson recognizes the poet’s creative power to shape 

language, his philosophy remains underpinned by an idealism that sees universal truths 

across all languages and cultures. This universalism is quite apparent in the essay 

“Books” from Society and Solitude (1870). There, Emerson asserts, “I do not hesitate to 

read . . . all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable,—

any real insight or broad human sentiment” (182). Emerson thus overlooks and devalues 

any culturally specific content that translation might erase. Indeed, it is not this difference 

but only “broad human sentiment” that interests him. He further underestimates the 

creative work of the translator by comparing the act of translation to technology, writing 

that one series of translations “have done for literature what railroads have done for 

internal intercourse” and that he “should as soon think of swimming across Charles River 

when [he wishes] to go to Boston, as of reading all [his] books in originals” (182). 

Emerson imagines that the act of translation is just as efficient and mechanical as any 

human innovation. Once again taking for granted the universality of human experience 

and the unproblematic correspondence between language and reality, Emerson overlooks 

what is really lost through translation’s expediency.
11

 When Melville uses the traveler’s 

                                                 
11

 Similarly, in his reading of Walter Benjamin, Derrida connects the belief in translation 

to religious certainty: “Translation, the desire for translation, is not thinkable without this 

correspondence with a thought of God. In the text of 1916, which already accorded the 

task of the translator, his Aufgabe, with the response made to the gift of tongues and the 

gift of names . . . , Benjamin named God at this point, that of a correspondence between 

the languages engaged in translation. In this narrow context, there was also the matter of 

the relations between language of things and language of men, between the silent and the 

speaking, the anonymous and the nameable, but the axiom held, no doubt, for all 

translation: ‘the objectivity of this translation is guaranteed in God’” (182). Perfect 

translation is only possible if all human languages are derived from a single divine root, 

and if the names man assigns to nature are firmly affixed. 



 

 

xxvi 

encounter with foreign language to highlight the inherent difference of other cultures, his 

work clearly counteracts such idealistic philosophies of translation and universality, as 

well as the chauvinistic attitudes toward foreign differences they can so easily support. 

This interplay between universalism and cultural difference will be a persistent subject 

throughout Transnational Translation. 

American Cosmopolitanism in the Early Republic 

The texts examined in the following chapters also draw on a longer history of 

travel and of American attitudes toward the foreign. During the American Revolution, 

Benjamin Franklin was the figurehead of American cosmopolitanism.
12

 Franklin’s views 

were cosmopolitan in both the political and the more general senses, as Thomas Schlereth 

demonstrates. In terms of “international law,” Franklin believed in the “protection of 

neutral and noncombatant rights and the idea of arbitration of international disputes,” but 

he also wished “to make himself as well as his fellow provincials ‘as intelligent as most 

Gentlemen from Other countries’” (Schlereth 121, 128). Thus Franklin not only believed 

in the international cooperation of states, but he was also cosmopolitan in his desire to 

elevate America to the cultural level of Europe. Far from the willful ignorance of foreign 

manners that Twain would flaunt at the end of the nineteenth-century, Franklin’s 

cosmopolitan outlook ensured his diplomatic success in France during the American 

Revolution. However, like Cooper, Franklin also balanced the worldliness necessary to 

                                                 
12

 In his examination of the cosmopolitanism of another American writer from the period, 

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Edward Larkin also lists Franklin, Thomas Paine (who 

will be discussed below), and Thomas Jefferson as major cosmopolites of the American 

Revolution (53). Larkin further describes two primary ideas of eighteenth-century 

cosmopolitanism: “sympathy and commerce” (53). Both versions of involvement with 

foreign peoples will play a major role in the following chapters. 



 

 

xxvii 

achieve his diplomatic goals with a sense of distinctly American identity and a passionate 

current of patriotism.
13

 In France, Franklin emphasized his Americanness while still 

endearing himself to the French nobility. Thus, at the end of the eighteenth century, 

Franklin demonstrated a political, philosophical, and cultural cosmopolitanism that was 

not incompatible with American patriotism. 

Franklin’s residence in France during the Revolution established one model for 

Americans abroad, but public opinion about the country’s international relations shifted 

radically in the following decades. The career of Tomas Paine, a second quintessentially 

cosmopolitan figure, illustrates this shift. Paine’s political beliefs encompassed what 

Thomas C. Walker calls “the most enduring strands of cosmopolitan thought in 

international relations: democratic governance, free trade, high degrees of 

interdependence, nonprovocative defense policies, a recognition that conquest cannot be 

profitable, and a universal respect for human rights” (52). Further, as Philipp Ziesche 

argues, Paine’s popularity in America and then France demonstrates the centrality of 

“cosmopolitan universalism” in both countries’ revolutions (3). However, public views of 

Paine, positive during the American Revolution but growing increasingly negative due to 

his support of the alarmingly radical and violent French Revolution, map a corresponding 

shift in public opinion as the initial cosmopolitanism of both American and French 

revolutionaries gave way to an increasing sense of nationalism (Schlereth 133; Ziesche 

108). Yet, despite the backlash against Enlightenment cosmopolitanism at the turn of the 

                                                 
13

 This duality in Franklin’s attitudes is one subject of Jonathan Dull’s article on 

Franklin’s diplomacy. Dull argues that “[b]eneath Franklin’s cosmopolitanism and charm 

lay the heart of a zealous patriot as uncompromising as Samuel Adams,” but Dull also 

emphasizes Franklin’s “public image, that of a simple Quaker in a fur cap” (349). 



 

 

xxviii 

nineteenth century, Ziesche also describes “a resilient tradition of revolutionary 

cosmopolitanism” that lasted through the general shift to nationalism, particularly for the 

private American citizens residing in France who continued to practice the “public 

diplomacy” of letters and pamphlets first mastered by Franklin, at least until such 

activities were outlawed by congress in 1799 (Ziesche 166, 116-33). Thus, although the 

widespread feelings of cosmopolitanism first epitomized by Franklin and his fellow 

revolutionaries decreased during the French Revolution and the ensuing wars, support of 

American participation in international politics and culture continued into Cooper’s day. 

The shifting values of cosmopolitanism and nationalism were also evident in 

debates over American language. In accordance with his other cosmopolitan attitudes, 

Franklin was quite interested in the possibility of “a universal language for use among the 

philosophes” (Schlereth 43). While he “especially welcomed French as the cosmopolite’s 

international language,” he also taught himself Spanish, Italian, German, and Latin (4). 

Franklin clearly valued communication across different nations and cultures, finding 

worth in the thoughts of those who speak foreign languages, at least European ones. But 

this cosmopolitan view of foreign language did not remain unchallenged. In sharp 

contrast to Franklin’s desire for international communication, the various proposals for a 

new American language sought to further separate the newly independent country from 

England.
14

 The suggested candidates for an American language ranged from Noah 

                                                 
14

 As Cushing Strout puts it, “Noah Webster . . . made an appeal for a national tongue 

because for America to adopt Old World standards would be to betray the bloom of 

youth” (16). One of the most extended treatments of language in early America is David 

Simpson’s The Politics of American English, 1776-1850, which demonstrates that the 

issue of language was one of “weighty cultural, political, and economic importance” (7). 

Thomas Gustafson’s Representative Words, Christopher Looby’s Voicing America, and 

Jay Fliegelman’s Declaring Independence also examine language in the Early Republic. 



 

 

xxix 

Webster’s drastic respelling of English, to ancient languages such as Hebrew or Greek, 

and even, in some accounts, to Algonquin (M. West 1-2; Shell, “Babel” 6). Often, such 

proposals were another manifestation of growing American nationalism. For example, 

one reason Noah Webster wanted drastic spelling reforms was to protect American 

printers, who would benefit from the business of “translating” all British books into the 

new American orthography (D. Simpson, Politics 53). Thus, not only would such plans 

distinguish the United States from England, but they would place a stronger linguistic 

barrier between American writers and the international community of thinkers.  

Nevertheless, some proposals for an American language were not so clearly 

uncosmopolitan. In 1829, James Ruggles submitted to congress a plan for a “universal 

language” that would solve the dual problems of “the inconvenience of a diversity of 

tongues and dialects, which obstruct a free intercourse of thought between persons of 

different countries,” and the fact that “the languages of all nations are more or less 

imperfect and incorrect” (Ruggles v). Accordingly, Ruggles devised “a philosophical 

language, more correct and simple than any one in use, . . . carrying with it to all nations, 

an inducement, arising from its intrinsic merit and ease of acquisition, which should lead 

to its universal adoption” (vi). Ruggles hoped that, if the United States adopted his 

language, other nations would follow suit—thus reversing the fragmentation and 

confusion caused by the curse of Babel. Michael West calls James Ruggles’s submission 

for a new American language “the first mixed universal language” of the ilk of Esperanto 

(3). Unfortunately for the cosmopolitan aim of universal understanding, his scheme—in 

which the phrase “They are in excellent health” would translate to “Konpis salzdxrp 

bonzmxn” (Ruggles 152)—was never adopted. Nevertheless, as examples like Ruggles 



 

 

xxx 

demonstrate, the debates over American language were yet another arena in which the 

battle between Americans’ participation in a cosmopolitan community and the calls for a 

narrower sense of nationalism was fought out. 

 

The complex balance between cosmopolitanism and nationalism during the early 

republic, as well as the relation of such principles to the representation of foreign 

language, are best illustrated by one popular writer of the period, Royall Tyler. Tyler’s 

most famous work, his play The Contrast, places the proper but unadorned speech of the 

hero Colonel Manly above both the amusing Yankeeisms of the bumpkin Jonathan and 

the affected and foreign-phrase-dropping speech of both the foppish Dimple and his 

pretentious servant Jessamy. The play thus aims to help early American audiences find a 

balance between utter provincialism and slavish attention to European conventions. Tyler 

is also a useful figure for bridging the gap between the Enlightenment ideal of 

cosmopolitanism espoused by Franklin and the modified combination of 

cosmopolitanism and nationalism that characterized the United States in the early 

decades of the nineteenth century. On one hand, Tyler demonstrates the desire for 

universal language and understanding that characterized Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. 

At the same time, he models the combination of cosmopolitanism and patriotism that will 

characterize Cooper’s writings several decades later. 

Although they are not as frequently read or anthologized as The Contrast, Tyler’s 

two fictional travel narratives, The Algerine Captive (1797) and The Yankey in London 



 

 

xxxi 

(1809), offer a valuable introduction to the works examined in the following chapters.
15

 

In The Algerine Captive, Tyler mocks the pretention of a classical education when used 

merely to impress a boorish and ignorant public, but the protagonist Updike Underhill’s 

experiences in captivity demonstrate that such a broad linguistic education can be useful 

to a world citizen. The brunt of the satire, then, is directed not at the classical pretentions 

of Underhill but at his countrymen’s provincial failure to appreciate advanced learning. 

The first half of Tyler’s bifurcated novel describes Underhill’s youth and early 

career in America. A local minister, who is more impressed by the loud volume of the 

boy’s recitation than its content, convinces Underhill’s parents to educate their son for 

college. Although the next four years find the youth “labouring incessantly at Greek and 

Latin,” he neglects the study of English grammar because, as Underhill reports, “my 

preceptor, knowing nothing of it himself, could communicate nothing to me” (25). Tyler 

suggests that, whatever benefits a classical education might provide, it should not be 

prioritized above speaking proper English. When the time comes for Underhill to attend 

college, however, his father is shocked to learn that his son’s Greek is only useful for 

obtaining additional unpractical education, and that “all that is useful in [Greek books] 

                                                 
15

 The Algerine Captive is not often examined in detail, but several have rightly praised it 

as an early anti-slavery novel (see Benchérif 46; Blum, View 55). It is also mentioned as 

an early example of sea fiction, although most note that the maritime scenes are not 

treated with any significant amount of descriptive detail (see Clohessy; Wharton 56; T. 

Philbrick, James 31). Cathy N. Davidson reads the novel as an example of the picaresque 

genre in early American literature, and her description of the picaresque’s ability to “leap 

from one construction of reality to its inverse” is particularly helpful in unraveling the 

varied and seemingly contradictory references to language throughout the novel (242). 

Cooper praises The Algerine Captive in a 1822 review of A New-England Tale, calling it 

“Mr. Tyler’s forgotten, and we fear, lost narrative,” and he advises, “Any future collector 

of our national tales, would do well to snatch [it] from oblivion, and to give [it] that place 

among the memorials of other days, which is due to the early and authentic historians of a 

country” (“Art. V.” 336-37). 



 

 

xxxii 

. . . is already translated into English; and more of the sense and spirit may be imbibed, 

from translations, than most scholars would be able to extract, from the originals” (28). 

Although Underhill is initially “left . . . proud of [his] Greek,” he laments, “[t]he little 

advantage, this deceased language has since been to me” and he “regret[s] the mispense 

[sic] of time, in acquiring it” (29). The problem with learning Greek appears to be one of 

economy: it may be an impressive accomplishment, but a young American could better 

employ his time either perfecting his English grammar or performing useful labor on his 

father’s farm. 

While these early scenes might suggest that Tyler privileges parochial practicality 

over a more cosmopolitan involvement in international intellectual circles, later scenes 

prove Underhill’s education to be more useful than it first appeared. While Underhill’s 

pretentious Greek recitations are a liability in courtship and other social relations—one 

lady calls him “papish” after mistaking his Greek for French, and another is insulted 

when he compares her to “the ox eyed Juno” (33,46)—his languages are an asset in the 

study of medicine. Not only is Greek “some service to [him], in now and then finding the 

root of the labels cyphered on [their] gallipots,” but one practicing physician impresses 

and recruits his patients by quoting random phrases from Latin grammars (54, 68-69). 

This latter application may seem the most egregious misuse of classical learning, but 

unlike Underhill’s earlier pub recitations, it proves beneficial to all involved. Underhill 

had found no demand for his medical expertise in a town overpopulated by quacks, but 

his supposed apprenticeship to the Latin-quoting “learned doctor” allows the pair to 

administer sound treatments to willing patients. It even gives Underhill the opportunity to 

teach his “master” real medicine. 



 

 

xxxiii 

In the second half of Tyler’s novel, Underhill uses his skill with languages and his 

medical training to improve his position in Algiers, contrasting the spurious and 

pretentious learning of the first half to the real cosmopolitanism necessary for Underhill’s 

survival in captivity. When he leaves the hard labor of the Christian slaves for the luxury 

of the college, where the Mollah tries to convert him to Islam, the two converse in Latin 

(138). His Latin is further useful in learning the “Lingua Franca” of Algiers, which 

“contain[s] many Latin derivatives” (137). Underhill is initially critical of this pidgin 

mixture “of the shreds and clippings of all the tongues, dead and living, ever spoken since 

the creation” (137), but a continued inability to speak to his captors would have made life 

more difficult and his eventual escape less likely. In the end, just as Underhill’s prior 

linguistic knowledge helps him to adapt to the international community in Algiers, the 

experience of his captivity further expands his worldliness.
16

 As Cathy N. Davidson 

argues, “For Underhill, to travel is to see different things, but, more important, to sojourn 

for six years in Algiers is to see things differently” (302). Thus, Tyler sets a precedent for 

Cooper in his complex assessment of the value of advanced education. While American 

                                                 
16

 It is interesting to observe, however, that much of the use Underhill obtains from his 

classical education comes from his Latin, which is historically an international language 

of learning, rather than from his Greek, which is more truly a dead language. A parallel to 

this distinction can be seen in Cooper’s biography. When he first enrolled at Yale, the 

young Cooper had no trouble with Latin but continued to struggle with Greek after barely 

gleaning enough of that language from a private tutor to pass the entrance requirements 

(W. Franklin, Early Years 47). In The Pilot, Cooper might have been thinking of his own 

early expulsion from Yale, as well as his difficulty with Greek, when Barnstable 

proclaims: “Grif is a seaman; though I have heard him even read the testament in Greek! 

Thank God, I had the wisdom to run away from school the second day they undertook to 

teach me a strange tongue, and I believe I am the more honest man, and the better 

seaman, for my ignorance!” (322). Despite Barnstable’s skepticism of the value of a 

classical education, Griffith’s more measured decisions throughout The Pilot 

demonstrate, as Underhill discovers in Algiers, that there can be great benefits to such 

linguistic knowledge. 



 

 

xxxiv 

society does not require the high level of education that the spurious doctors feign, it is 

equally foolish to repudiate learning altogether, thereby cutting off all possibilities of 

meaningful intercourse with the world. Deciding what education to pursue may warrant 

attention to the practical realities of American life, but it should not use practicality as an 

excuse for provinciality. 

Tyler’s admiration for classical languages is even more apparent in his second 

fictitious travelogue, The Yankey in London, consisting of letters “Written by an 

American Youth, During Nine Month’s Residence in the City of London” on various 

aspects of English politics, life, and culture. When asked for his “opinion of the English 

language, taken in comparison with the various languages of Europe,” the American 

suggests using classical languages as a benchmark (171-73). He asserts that one can 

judge a modern language’s quality by seeing how well a sentiment expressed in Greek or 

Latin can be translated into that language. For Tyler, the ideas of Homer are perfectly 

expressed in Greek, and English can prove its quality by conveying those same ideas. 

Thus, Tyler esteems classical languages for their closeness to an ideal of universal 

language that might transcend national bias and cultural specificity. By holding perfect 

translatability as a paragon of linguistic virtue, Tyler reveals a cosmopolitan desire for 

communication between all peoples and the same linguistic idealism later espoused by 

Transcendentalism. As the example of Anacharsis Cloots demonstrates, however, this 

assumption of universality has a tendency to slip into both cultural and political 

imperialism.  

Tyler also critiques the charge that American language is provincial. He begins 

the letter on “Bite—bamboozle—all the rage—quiz—quizzical—bore—horrid bore—I 



 

 

xxxv 

owe you one—that’s a good one,” by criticizing what he calls “cant words, or quaint 

expressions” (101). Tyler’s complaint is the same timeless railing of the stickler that can 

be seen in Cooper’s The American Democrat (see Chapter One), in Twain’s famous 

lampooning of Cooper, and in the lessons of curmudgeonly English teachers everywhere. 

Things become more interesting however, when the letter writer recounts a discussion 

with an English friend. The American does not notice his own “repeated use” of the “verb 

guess” until the Englishman calls his attention to “this provincialism, as he styled it” 

(105). The American counters by pointing out that his friend’s use of “clever” or “clever 

fellow” is just as deviant from “modern English fine writing” (106). When the two decide 

to work together to rid themselves of such vulgar speech patterns, the expressions are no 

longer called “provincialisms” but “colloquialisms,” with their geographical and political 

implications removed (106). While the Englishman was quick to blame the American’s 

sub-standard word choice on his country’s provincialism, Tyler makes it clear that such 

linguistic faults can be found on both sides of the Atlantic. By applying the tolerance of 

cultural and linguistic difference that is the hallmark of cosmopolitanism onto the United 

States, Tyler highlights linguistic variety in order to collapse the hierarchy between the 

language of the provinces and of the metropole. 

Overall, in these letters, Tyler espouses a perspective of linguistic relativism. 

When he admits that an inherent bias toward one’s native tongue prevents a fair 

comparison between languages, his attitude is far from provincial. In contrast to the 

unreflecting nationalism that will become common at the end of the nineteenth century, 

Tyler recognizes that most linguistic judgments will be biased because the “language in 

which [one] can most readily convey his ideas, he will be prone to consider the best” 



 

 

xxxvi 

(172). Similarly, Tyler does not advocate a permanent idea of pure English, but 

acknowledges that all languages change over time, transitioning through “the 

incoherency and simplicity of youth, the vigour of manhood, and the decline and 

decrepitude of old age” (175). The American gives his opinion on the state of the English 

language, but admits he may be mistaken because “a nation can never judge of its own 

decline in language” (178). Alfred Bendixen has read Tyler’s fictitious travelogue as a 

work of chauvinistic nationalism (104), but this linguistic relativity indicates a greater 

degree of cosmopolitanism than Bendixen recognizes. Indeed, Caleb Crain also calls 

Tyler “a cosmopolitan who composed poems in the style of the Persian poet and mystic 

Hafez (whose name means ‘one who has memorized the Koran’)” (xxxii). Although he is 

deeply invested in giving his characters a particularly American identity, Tyler models 

the openness to foreign language and thought that will become increasingly absent from 

travel literature during the nineteenth century. 

Foreign Language Encounters in the Nineteenth Century 

The three major figures in this study—James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, 

and Mark Twain—all confront the reality of foreign language and translation in their 

descriptions of travel to both the “civilized” world of Europe and the “savage” lands of 

the Southern and Eastern hemispheres. Tracing the representation of foreign language 

and the assessment of translatability in accounts of travel to both types of countries 

reveals these writers’ attitudes toward “otherness” and toward the possibility of bridging 

cultural differences. Whether a work encourages a cosmopolitan appreciation of foreign 

culture, or supports a nationalistic preference for only one’s own language and culture, 

the representation of linguistic difference raises deeper issues of economic and cultural 



 

 

xxxvii 

incommensurability and demonstrates how American writers conceive of and portray the 

United States’ place in the world. Cooper balances cosmopolitanism and patriotism by 

valuing national differences and the differences between languages. Melville extends 

Cooper’s linguistic cosmopolitanism to Western and non-Western languages alike, 

critiquing the views of “savage” language found in imperialist discourse. At the end of 

the century, however, Twain’s travel writings will suggest, not entirely in jest, that any 

communication outside of American English is ridiculous. This trajectory is elaborated in 

the five chapters that follow. 

The first chapter examines Cooper’s writings about travel to Europe, tracing his 

fusion of patriotism and cosmopolitanism from the representation of the Revolutionary 

War in The Pilot, through his own travels to Europe as documented in the five 

travelogues that constitute Gleanings in Europe, and concluding with a novel written 

after his return, Homeward Bound. Throughout these texts, it becomes clear that 

Cooper’s travel continues an older model of extended residence in European society and 

that it espouses a cosmopolitan resistance to translation. Cooper includes numerous 

passages of untranslated European language in his travel writing, thereby imagining and 

promoting a cosmopolitan readership with extensive linguistic education and appreciation 

for European culture. Although he does not dream of a universal language as did Tyler 

and the cosmopolites of the Enlightenment, Cooper seeks to counteract America’s 

perceived provincialism by speaking the languages of Europe, and he sees value in the 

distinct traits of each language—the inherent differences that resist translation. 

Cooper is also the central author in the second chapter, but here the focus shifts 

away from Europe. Scenes from Afloat and Ashore and Homeward Bound demonstrate 



 

 

xxxviii 

Cooper’s engagement with the imperialist representation of native languages in texts 

ranging from the discovery of Columbus through the United States Exploring Expedition 

of 1838-1842. Cooper’s works demonstrate the imperialist’s paradoxical desire to both 

emphasize difference and to efface it, to view “savage” language as both utterly 

incomprehensible and easily translatable. Cooper further explores this paradox in his own 

retelling of the Columbus story, Mercedes of Castile. Both this underappreciated novel 

and another later work, The Crater, also raise the issue of economic incommensurability, 

which proves to be yet another kind of cultural difference that resists translation. 

Cooper’s final assessment of American expansionism remains somewhat ambivalent, but 

the themes first introduced in his later works provide an invaluable framework for the 

examination of Melville in the following chapter. 

The third chapter builds on the historical and theoretical groundwork laid in 

Chapter Two by examining the representation of non-European languages in the works of 

Melville. It traces his developing theory of language and translation beginning in Typee; 

continuing through Omoo, Mardi, and parts of Moby-Dick; and concluding with 

Melville’s most pointed critique of translation in “Benito Cereno.” Inspired by his own 

experiences of linguistic encounter, Melville begins his literary career by portraying the 

complexities of cross-cultural communication with a level of nuance and sensitivity that 

is new to the tradition of colonial and imperialist texts he both critiques and builds upon. 

By paying increasing attention to the difficulties of translation and to the nature of 

language, Melville develops a theory of the inherent incommensurability of different 

languages and cultures, a theory that counters the universalizing tendencies not only of 

idealist views of natural language but also of imperialism’s will-to-power. 



 

 

xxxix 

Taking a slight step back in the chronology, the fourth chapter returns to 

European travel, picking up where the first chapter left off. By examining the more 

conventional travel writings of Bayard Taylor (Views A-Foot), Margaret Fuller (Tribune 

dispatches), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands), it traces the 

gradual change from the extended residence epitomized by Cooper to the tourism boom 

after the Civil War. Increasingly, American travelers became less interested in learning 

foreign languages, and less interested in the real content of foreign culture, preferring 

instead the cultural capital acquired from the act of merely having been to or having seen 

the conventional stops of the tourist’s itinerary. This chapter also explores Melville’s 

engagement with these changes in American travel, examining the maritime alternative to 

tourism presented in Redburn as well as the eventual acquiescence to both tourism and 

translation evident in Clarel. 

Finally, the changes examined in Chapter Four culminate in the tourist age of the 

late nineteenth century, and in the archetypal American abroad found in the travel 

writings of Mark Twain. Twain’s two European travel narratives, Innocents Abroad and 

A Tramp Abroad, present a burlesque account of cross-cultural communication, 

lampooning Americans pretentious enough to flaunt their knowledge of European 

languages, and ultimately suggesting that such linguistic knowledge is both elusive and 

useless. While Samuel Clemens, the man behind the persona, may become increasingly 

cosmopolitan in the later decades of his life, Twain’s continuing jokes about the folly of 

translation fortify the United States’ intensifying attitudes of linguistic and cultural 

nationalism. The study concludes with an examination of Henry James’s The American, 

which, along with the examination of Following the Equator in Chapter Five, 



 

 

xl 

demonstrates that the once distinct representations of European and non-European 

languages converge by the end of the century, with the result that all linguistic difference 

is viewed with the imperialist’s combination of avoidance and disavowal. 

By examining the complex interplay of linguistic, cultural, and economic 

exchange in American travel to disparate parts of the globe with equally varied purposes, 

this study reveals a nineteenth-century version of what is often taken as a postmodern 

state of global exchange, what Bhabha describes as the “circulations of signs and 

commodities [that] are caught in the vicious circuits of surplus value that link First World 

capital to Third World labour markets” (30). In the nineteenth century, American 

travelers faced a similarly complex array of circulating signs and commodities, and one 

index of how they conceptualized these varied moments and modes of exchange is their 

representation of the translatability of linguistic difference. The “transnational turn” in 

American literary studies has uncovered countless examples of underappreciated authors 

writing from locations and in languages only newly included under the umbrella of 

“American literature.” This study offers a complementary vision of American 

transnationalism, finding in three of the most canonical American novelists an account of 

American identity that crosses the boundaries of both language and place. 

 



 

1 

CHAPTER 1 

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER’S LINGUISTIC COSMOPOLITANISM 

The end of the Napoleonic Wars marked a resurgence in transatlantic travel. Gone 

were both the xenophobic nationalism inspired by the French Revolution and the military 

danger caused by the War of 1812. Americans began once again to revisit their cultural 

roots by traveling to the Old World.
1
 This period also gave rise to one of the first major 

American novelists, and the first major figure in this study, James Fenimore Cooper. 

Cooper builds upon the cosmopolitan tradition of the American Revolution in many of 

his transatlantic works, and issues of language and translation are pervasive throughout 

his extensive writings.  

An overwhelming majority of the scholarship on Cooper has focused on the 

Leatherstocking Tales. One subset of this trend examines Cooper’s presentation of Native 

American speech supposedly “translated” into English, an admittedly interesting facet of 

Cooper’s engagement with language. But the emphasis on American settings also has 

given the misleading impression that Cooper was most, if not solely, interested in the 

themes of American exceptionalism and the frontier.
2
 Moreover, in contrast to Cooper’s 

cosmopolitan engagement with foreign languages abroad, his treatment of Native 

                                                 
1
 See Foster Rhea Dulles’s Americans Abroad for a detailed history of nineteenth-century 

American travel. 

2
 Luis Iglesias makes a similar distinction between Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and 

his sea novels. He explains, “The maritime setting gives Copper [sic] license to explore 

new strategies for presenting American materials, open to a world of languages, customs, 

and encounters distinct from the epic western expansion with which the Leatherstocking 

novels are so persistently identified.” 



 

2 

American language tends toward the stereotypical.
3
 Previous critics have rightly 

demonstrated Cooper’s attention to linguistic difference, but their limited focus has 

overemphasized his interest in the act of translation.
4
 As the following argument will 

reveal, Cooper’s numerous works with foreign settings contain a different treatment of 

multilingualism.  

Shifting the focus away from the Leatherstocking Tales reveals that their author 

had a far more international outlook. Indeed, like his cosmopolitan predecessors, Cooper 

balanced pride in his American identity with an appreciation for foreign languages and 

cultures. This cosmopolitan attitude is revealed by the representation of European 

                                                 
3
 Michael West, for example, explains how Cooper’s depiction of Native American 

language is stereotypically full of gesture and physical metaphors, and how Cooper 

thereby “insist[s] on the physicality of Indian languages” and invites “readers to imagine 

a primitive consciousness that had somehow avoided the Cartesian split between mind 

and body, word and world” (297-98). Eric Cheyfitz is even more critical of Cooper’s 

presentation of Native American languages as languages of metaphor, arguing that the 

author views “civilization as that state which distinguishes between the literal and the 

metaphoric” (“Literally” 79).  

4
 Colleen Glenney Boggs includes a reading of The Last of the Mohicans in her study of 

the theme of translation in nineteenth-century American literature. She argues that 

Cooper “theoriz[es] moments when translation fails or succeeds only partially,” thereby 

recognizing the “alterity that remains beyond the discursive reading of translation” (63). 

Cheyfitz reads acts of translation in The Pioneers as representative of the violence done 

to Native Americans by whites (“Literally” 75). Lawrence Alan Rosenwald calls 

attention to “Cooper’s scenes of magical translation,” in which statements in unknown 

languages are somehow easily understood (30). Michael Kowalewski notes in his reading 

of The Deerslayer that, whatever Cooper may have hoped to achieve with his “translated” 

scenes, they leave Cooper open to the “embarrassment” of his work’s obvious artificiality 

(73). Michael West comes closest to the conclusions that I will draw from the less-

examined portion of Cooper’s works when he argues, “The Leatherstocking Tales are 

permeated with the conviction that verbal expression is radically ambiguous. The mute 

grandeur of Cooper’s wilderness is always menaced by a babel of languages, by diverse 

dialects and idiolects competing for center stage. Each undermines the others’ claims to 

represent the world truly” (297). Other readings of language and translation in Cooper 

include those of Stephen Blakemore (“Language” and “Strange”), Jeffrey Hotz 

(Divergent), and Andrew Newman. 



 

3 

language in The Pilot, Gleanings in Europe, and Homeward Bound. In these transatlantic 

encounters, Cooper does not pretend to translate foreign languages but rather avoids the 

act of translation whenever possible. He praises the figure of the cosmopolitan traveler 

who can speak and understand the languages of other countries and emphasizes the 

sophisticated perspective such a traveler gains by confronting the alterity that translation 

would have obscured.
5
  

The Meaning of “English” in The Pilot 

As examined in the Introduction, the American Revolution was a catalyst for a 

number of important changes in American attitudes toward foreign language: it fostered 

the cosmopolitanism of social contract theorists and foreign diplomats such as Thomas 

Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin; encouraged a greater emphasis on 

French language and culture; and incited a series of debates over the desirability of 

distinguishing the young republic from England in its language as well as its government 

and culture. Although the purer cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment began to give way 

to a growing sense of nationalism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Cooper, 

when compared to the later writers in this study, clearly values cosmopolitan 

multilingualism as an essential component of American travel. The history of 

cosmopolitanism in America plays a major role in one of Cooper’s Revolutionary novels, 

                                                 
5
 Other critics who have recognized Cooper’s cosmopolitanism, although not necessarily 

in the context of language and translation, include Robert Daly and Alisa Marko 

Iannucci. Virgil Nemoianu describes Cooper’s “cultural relativism” and argues that 

“Cooper . . . reflected on the issue of what we nowadays call multiculturalism and the 

place of relativity in human culture” (28). Robert Lawson-Peebles (341) and Thomas 

Clark (189) both use the term “transatlantic” in describing how Cooper’s political 

perspective transcended national boundaries. 



 

4 

The Pilot (1823).
6
 While Cooper’s early works about the American Revolution often 

have been viewed as nationalistic endeavors, a far more nuanced reading is possible when 

one takes into account the complexity of Cooper’s patriotism.
7
 In The Pilot, although 

Cooper ardently supports the political innovation of a democratic republic, he continues 

to see value in the culture of the mother country and consequently rejects the need for an 

arbitrary linguistic separation. The cosmopolitanism of these political views is mirrored 

in his conception of language. Because human language is both imperfect and 

heterogeneous, one must learn, understand, and identify as many variations as possible to 

ensure the clearest and most efficient communication. For Cooper, this heterogeneity also 

makes it foolish to conflate a national with a linguistic community; true patriotism must 

                                                 
6
 The Pilot is one of Cooper’s historical novels, but it is also considered Cooper’s first sea 

tale, a genre which scholars such as Ronald John Clohessy (n.p.) and Donald P. Wharton 

(58) have seen as an expression of nationalism. Indeed, Cooper is often said to have 

“[begun] the tradition of American sea fiction” (Foulke 20; see also W. Franklin, Early 

Years xxiii). As the later example of Melville will demonstrate, the literally international 

setting of sea literature makes it particularly relevant to the present study of 

plurilingualism and exchange in travel literature. Luis Iglesias summarizes this 

connection by arguing that “Cooper’s sea novels expose the complicated work of 

defining the nation in terms of its relation to international exchange.” Thus, while many 

readings of The Pilot have focused on Cooper’s vivid description of nautical scenes and 

his improvement on the unrealistic maritime description in Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate, 

Cooper’s novel also lends itself to a reading of America’s place in the transatlantic world. 

7
 George Dekker takes the first perspective when he criticizes The Pilot for being “a 

schoolboyish novel, vitiated especially by an ingenuous and rather unsavoury patriotism” 

(114). In contrast, David Simpson calls “Cooper’s patriotism . . . complex and never 

hyperbolic” (Politics 149). H. Daniel Peck describes Cooper’s ambivalent position 

between the two sides of the Revolution and “the writer’s failure to commit himself either 

to the possibilities of freedom and the future or to the values of tradition and the past” 

(596). Jason Berger also examines “Cooper’s anxiety about the American Revolution and 

nationalism proper” (644); William P. Kelly notes that “The Pilot shares with The Spy an 

understanding of the American Revolution as a civil war” (114); and John P. McWilliams 

similarly describes how Cooper “[draws] no clear distinctions of merit between the 

British and American forces operating in the neutral ground” (Political 75). 



 

5 

distinguish between empty markers of national identity and national characteristics 

genuinely worth promoting.  

It might seem strange to begin a study of foreign language with a work set in 

England, but the issues of translation and equivalence that must be confronted when 

faced with a foreign language are never absent even in one’s own language. Indeed, as 

Michael Cronin argues, “The language of home becomes stranger and more labyrinthine 

in the mouths and minds of others who ostensibly speak the same language” (Across 3).
8
 

Cooper highlights the heterogeneity within English in order to negotiate the associations 

between national identity, language, and gentility. Indeed, The Pilot works against the 

idea of a unified language from its opening dialogue, in which laborers on shore discuss 

the arriving ships. Their conversation is rendered phonetically in Irish and Scottish 

dialects. While the rest of the novel will focus on the growing division between the 

Americans and the English, the dialects of these two minor characters fall outside of the 

American/English binary. They remind readers that the heterogeneity of the English 

language has a far deeper history than the American Revolution. Because of the many 

varieties of English, any simple one-to-one correspondence between language and nation 

becomes impossible. Although The Pilot ostensibly celebrates the American Revolution, 

it is clear from the opening scene that Cooper refuses to espouse any easy nationalism. 

Without a monolithic concept of “Englishness” to reject, citizens of the new republic 

                                                 
8
 Cronin further suggests that “translation is more explicitly emphasised in intralingual 

travelling than in interlingual travelling. It is as if intralingual accounts ward off the 

threat of (language) sameness through the highlighting of (language) difference while 

interlingual accounts counter the menace of irreducible (language) difference through the 

reiteration of sameness (minimising or making invisible the transaction costs of 

translation)” (Across 10-11). 



 

6 

would have to consider what was valuable and different in the new country and what of 

the old should and must be maintained. 

The heterogeneity of English established in the opening sequence becomes even 

more prominent in Cooper’s treatment of the technical language of sailors. Cooper’s use 

of nautical jargon was groundbreaking, and it remains, accordingly, one of the most 

examined elements of Cooper’s first sea tale. A representative passage from The Pilot 

illustrates the key characteristics of Cooper’s nautical description: 

Griffith gave forth from his trumpet the command to “heave away!” Again 

the strains of the fife were followed by the tread of the men at the 

capstern. At the same time that the anchor was heaving up, the sails were 

loosened from the yards, and opened to invite the breeze. In effecting this 

duty, orders were thundered through the trumpet of the first lieutenant, and 

executed with the rapidity of thought. Men were to be seen, like spots in 

the dim light from the heavens, lying on every yard, or hanging as in air, 

while strange cries were heard issuing from every part of the rigging, and 

each spar of the vessel. “Ready the foreroyal,” cried a shrill voice, as if 

from the clouds; “ready the fore yard,” uttered the hoarser tones of a 

seaman beneath him; “all ready aft, sir,” cried a third, from another 

quarter; and in a few moments, the order was given to “let fall.” (43-44) 

Many critics have noted Cooper’s ability in such passages to incorporate technical 

language without totally obscuring the meaning for lay readers.
9
 This example includes 

some specialized vocabulary, such as “capstern,” “foreroyal,”and “fore yard,” but the 

general action, if not the particular sails and masts of a frigate, is clear. By combining 

metaphorical description, such as comparing the sailors in the rigging to “spots in the dim 

                                                 
9
 Both Thomas Philbrick (James 12) and Wayne Franklin (Early Years 409) note 

Cooper’s reluctance to employ overly technical language, although Cooper felt that some 

was necessary for his nautical subject matter. Hester Blum argues that “Cooper employs 

nautical vocabulary and knowledge” so that “the metaphorics . . . would be accessible to 

the reader who might not be familiar with its technicalities” (View 85). According to 

Dekker, Cooper was able “to combine vivid descriptive prose and technical nautical 

language so artfully that the latter, not baffling the lay reader too much, actually 

enhanced the realistic effect of the former” (114).  



 

7 

light from the heavens,” with the more abstruse technical terms, Cooper achieves a vivid 

effect even if the distinction between a “yard” and a “spar” is lost.  

Yet the purpose of such technical terminology is not merely maritime flavor. 

Cooper demonstrates how being conversant in multiple “languages” allows 

communication to be as precise as possible. David Simpson looks at a similar example of 

Cooper’s “sea diction” in Homeward Bound and contends that the “passage is 

intimidating to the average reader, but to the sailor it is totally intelligible and totally 

precise” (Politics 199). Simpson explains that, in nautical jargon as in other technical 

uses of language, “[e]very word refers to an unambiguous thing or describes an 

unambiguous act” (199). Thus, in the above scene, the technical orders are “executed 

with the rapidity of thought” because they require no interpretation.
10

 Maintaining the 

technical specificity of nautical terms demonstrates a tendency of Cooper’s that will 

become more apparent in later works—leaving foreign languages untranslated. Cooper is 

unwilling to change or obscure the meaning of a passage by translating it into more 

standard English. But the precise meaning of jargon is only available to those readers 

with knowledge of nautical terms and the corresponding functions of a ship. In this way, 

Cooper’s nautical terminology points to the imperfection of human language. Either an 

avoidance of technical language (a “translation” of nautical actions into common terms) 

would decrease the specificity of the description, or an inclusion of jargon would obscure 

the action to lay readers. For this reason, Margaret Cohen’s assertion that such readers 

                                                 
10

 Mary K. Edwards also notes the value of precise nautical jargon: “At sea, the 

specificity of sailor language is an absolute necessity for the safety of the ship and crew. 

The cry ‘Let fly fore t’gallant sheets. Haul clews!’ results in one direct action that may be 

crucial to keep the vessel from destruction” (31). 



 

8 

can “garner unfamiliar knowledge” from Cooper’s nautical scenes is particularly 

significant (489). It is only by gaining expertise in nautical language (or in foreign 

languages, as will later be the case) that readers can avoid ambiguity and maximize their 

comprehension. 

In another passage, the quintessential sailor Tom Coffin demonstrates the value of 

his technical expertise by reading the language of sea and sky to predict dangerous 

weather approaching. He says: 

“I showed you how to knot a reef-point, and pass a gasket, Captain 

Barnstable, nor do I believe you could even take two half hitches when 

you first came aboard of the Spalmacitty. These be things that a man is 

soon expart in, but it takes the time of his nat’ral life to larn to know the 

weather. There be streaked wind-galls in the offing, that speak as plainly, 

to all that see them, and know God’s language in the clouds, as ever you 

spoke through a trumpet, to shorten sail; besides, sir, don’t you hear the 

sea moaning, as if it knew the hour was at hand when it was to wake up 

from its sleep!” (25) 

Coffin’s speech, like that of Natty Bumppo or of the two laborers in the opening scene, is 

marked by non-standard pronunciations. Yet, while Coffin may not be “expart” in proper 

English, he displays two other levels of linguistic expertise. The first, his familiarity with 

“knotting a reef-point” and “passing a gasket,” exemplifies the technical language seen 

throughout Cooper’s sea tale. The second language, “God’s language in the clouds,” is 

like Simpson’s explanation of jargon in that the signs can “speak . . . plainly, to all that 

see them.” Such knowledge of weather indicators has obvious value, but Coffin 

emphasizes that “God’s language” takes a lifetime of practice to master. By including 

nautical jargon in his narration, Cooper encourages and assists the reader in acquiring 

knowledges like these. Cooper further demonstrates the value of Coffin’s expertise in the 

ensuing action. Coffin’s warning for the hero, Barnstable, to cut short his romantic 



 

9 

interview with his disguised fiancée, Katharine, leads to the exciting escape of the two 

American ships, aided, of course, by the technical knowledge and language of the Pilot 

himself. While nautical jargon is not exactly equivalent to an entirely foreign language, 

Cooper’s use of technical language demonstrates the position on language acquisition 

that he will develop in later works. By refusing to translate technical actions into 

common terms, Cooper maintains the cultural specificity of nautical language while 

encouraging the reader to gain linguistic knowledge and, consequently, a more 

cosmopolitan outlook. 

While the nautical portions of The Pilot prove the value of linguistic variety, the 

drawing-room scenes that further the novel’s romantic plot demonstrate how language’s 

flexibility and multiplicity can be used for deceitful purposes.
11

 For example, Katharine’s 

letter to Barnstable repeatedly critiques the terminology of her loyalist guardian, Colonel 

Howard. She writes, “He used fifty opprobrious terms that I cannot remember, but among 

others were the beautiful epithets of ‘disorganizer,’ ‘leveller,’ ‘democrat,’ and ‘jacobin.’ 

(I hope he did not mean a monk!)” (67). Her complaint demonstrates the equivocality of 

such signifiers. The term “democrat” may be “opprobrious” to a loyalist, but an 

American revolutionary would claim it proudly. Likewise, “disorganizer” and “leveler” 

are only negative if one believes the status quo does not need to be disorganized or 

leveled. Language’s potential for misdirection is further highlighted by the anachronistic 

                                                 
11

 Many previous readers have preferred the exciting and vivid scenes of nautical action 

to the novel’s “land scenes,” but in largely ignoring the latter, they have missed the many 

references to language that clarify Cooper’s ambivalent nationalism. For example, Cohen 

quickly discounts half of The Pilot saying, “From its publication, . . . readers agreed that 

the love plots on land took a backseat to the real dramatic energy of the novel which is 

offered by the exploits of the mysterious shadowy pilot, John Paul Jones, as he stages 

raids off Scotland during the American Revolution” (484). 



 

10 

use of “jacobin,” which references the French Revolution.
12

 It is possible that this is 

merely Cooper’s error in chronology, but Katharine’s parenthetical “(I hope he did not 

mean a monk!)” makes a kind of metatextual linguistic joke. Katharine’s interjection 

calls attention to the only definition of “jacobin” available to her, but it is clear to the 

reader that the term’s most relevant definition, however anachronistic, is “a revolutionary 

with democratic principles.” Colonel Howard thus takes a word with a precise political 

and historical meaning out of context and uses it indiscriminately to signal the “enemy.” 

By highlighting how such “opprobrious epithets” have no fixed or simple meaning, 

Katharine demonstrates how easy it is for opposing viewpoints to be encapsulated with a 

disparaging term rather than addressed directly and examined thoughtfully. 

Katharine further critiques language’s potential for manipulation when she 

explains, “the rooms we inhabit are in the upper or third floor of a wing, that you may 

call a tower, if you are in a romantic mood, but which, in truth, is nothing but a wing” 

(68). Calling their section of St. Ruth’s a “tower” would conform to the standards of a 

romantic novel, but Katharine is quick to point out that this dramatic appellation is not 

entirely truthful. Here again, she calls attention to how an artful application of 

terminology can convey a connotation beyond what may be most factually accurate. 

Finally, Katharine gets to the root of the novel’s political conflict when she confides that 

the Americans are called “pirates” by her captors. She complains, “yes, that is the 

musical name they give you—and when their own people land, and plunder, and rob, and 

murder the men and insult the women, they are called heroes! It’s a fine thing to be able 

                                                 
12

 According to the OED, the French political use of the term “jacobin” dates no earlier 

than 1789, and its general application to any political reformer comes into use around 

1800 (“Jacobin, n.
1
 and adj.

1
”). 



 

11 

to invent names and make dictionaries” (69). Such names have more connection to the 

speaker’s feelings than to the reality they describe—and one mark of power is the ability 

to apply such terminology to one’s own advantage. The specificity of precise jargon is of 

no avail if it is not used in an accurate and straightforward way. Moreover, because there 

is no strong link between fallen human language and any divine or universal origin, 

words are only inadequate “inventions.” The precision made possible by linguistic variety 

may improve human communication, but it can never perfect it—there is always room for 

both inaccuracy and deceit. 

Katharine’s view of words conforms to one Cooper later expresses in The 

American Democrat (1838).
13

 From its beginning, Cooper’s treatise emphasizes “the 

necessity of distinguishing between names and things in governments, as well as in other 

matters” (15). This critical view of language is particularly important when interpreting 

the Constitution. Cooper asserts that many of the “popular errors” in understanding that 

document “have arisen from mistaking the meaning of [its] language” (22). Cooper’s 

emphasis on the ambiguous language of the Constitution is not surprising in light of 

Thomas Gustafson’s analysis in Representative Words. Gustafson argues, “since the 

Constitution is written in a fundamentally imperfect human language, the text—and the 

political order it creates—possesses the fundamental imperfections of language itself” 

(273).
14

 Yet Cooper does not doubt the existence of the “things” behind language’s 

                                                 
13

 For further discussion of the importance of The American Democrat, see Steven Watts 

(65) and John P. McWilliams (“Cooper” 666; Political 197). 

14
 Gustafson goes on to point out that moments of “judicial resolutions of conflict” are 

interpretive decisions, “a selective choice from a range of competing political values,” 

rather than the “discoveries or revelations” we hope them to be (T. Gustafson 273). This 

description of interpreting the Constitution as choosing one of an array of ambiguous 



 

12 

“names.” He explains his perspective in The American Democrat chapter “On 

Language.” Introducing his complaint about Americans’ indiscriminate use of the word 

“gentleman,” Cooper writes, “Some changes of the language are to be regretted, as they 

lead to false inferences, and society is always a loser by mistaking names for things. Life 

is a fact, and it is seldom any good arises from a misapprehension of the real 

circumstances under which we exist” (120). Cooper believes in a fixed reality beyond 

language, but he recognizes that the connection between that reality and the various 

names it is given is far from perfect. For Cooper, it is essential that words signal as 

precise a meaning as possible, but he rejects the marshaling of excess meaning for the 

sake of manipulation and deception. 

Cooper further highlights linguistic variety’s potential for both precision and 

deception through Katharine’s signal system, a series of romantic messages she translates 

into flag signs for communicating with the Americans from her confinement.
15

 Yet the 

                                                                                                                                                 

meanings is very much like Lawrence Venuti’s definition of translation as “a process by 

which the chain of signifiers that constitutes the foreign text is replaced by a chain of 

signifiers in the translating language which the translator provides on the strength of an 

interpretation” (13). In law, as in translation, the original text is often ambiguous, but it is 

not always possible to allow this inherent ambiguity to remain ambiguous. When 

interpreting the Constitution, as when translating a text, it is impossible to achieve a 

perfectly “literal” translation. A judicial resolution, like any translation, must be based on 

an interpretation of the original; it can never be a scientific transfer of meaning. 

15
 Previous readings of this system have been mixed. Blum credits Katharine’s 

achievement by noting that “her flags do provide for crucial information to be 

transferred,” but she concludes by admitting that the heroine’s “employment of such 

skills—a flirtatious point of appeal for her lover—is more precious than practiced” (View 

85). McWilliams cites the signal system as an example of how, unlike many of Cooper’s 

heroines, Katharine “proves to be a woman of action” (“More” 79). In light of 

Katharine’s critique of language use throughout the novel, however, it becomes clear that 

her signal system is more than a “precious” eccentricity or, as others have suggested, an 

indication of a potentially excellent captain’s wife. 



 

13 

first appearance of a flag comes before Katharine is even introduced. Cooper describes 

how the frigate accompanying the Ariel raises a “heavy ensign,” and, “a current of air 

opening, for a moment, its folds, the white field, and red cross, that distinguish the flag of 

England, [are] displayed to view” (15). The colors and shapes on the banner 

communicate that the ship is under British control. Like so many other instances of 

communication in the novel, however, this sign proves to be deceitful, as the ship 

actually contains the American revolutionaries who will be the heroes of the story. Thus, 

while Katharine’s signal language may seem laughable, it proves more reliable than the 

conventional display of a national flag, which is easily forged. In another example, 

Cooper emphasizes the importance of signal flags at sea when a soldier tells Griffith, 

“Why, they have shown him a yellow flag over a blue one, with a cornet, and that spells 

Ariel, in every signal-book we have; surely he can’t suspect the English of knowing how 

to read Yankee” (61). The flag systems are thus another example of the linguistic division 

between England and America as well as an opportunity to convey information securely. 

However, as Griffith notes in his reply, “I have known Yankees read more difficult 

English,” even these languages give opportunities for the interception and forgery of 

messages (61). Throughout the novel, signal language, like nautical jargon, proves to be 

an essential area of expertise, yet one that is not immune to miscommunication. 

Katharine has put quite a bit of ingenuity into developing her own signal 

language, and it is no small accomplishment. Even so, it is impossible not to smile at 

some of Katharine’s messages, what Griffith laughingly calls “a most judicious selection 

of phrases” including “‘No. 168. **** indelible;’ ‘169. **** end only with life;’ ‘170. 

**** I fear yours misleads me’” (84-85). More examples of Katharine’s phrases appear 



 

14 

when she puts her system to use. On one level, her signals are comical for their far-

fetched long-sightedness: 

“White over black,” repeated Katherine, rapidly, to herself, as she turned 

the leaves of her book.—“‘My messenger: has he been seen?’—To that 

we must answer the unhappy truth. Here it is— yellow, white, and red—

‘he is a prisoner.’ How fortunate that I should have prepared such a 

question and answer. (314) 

Despite Katharine’s claim to be particularly “fortunate,” this exchange leads one to 

wonder how many signals she would have had to devise in order to have precisely these 

messages available. Her hurried page turning suggests that the result is somewhat 

cumbersome. The comedy reaches a climax when Katharine uses a signal that means, 

“When the Abbey clock strikes nine, come with care to the wicket, which opens, at the 

east side of the Paddock, on the road: until then, keep secret” (315). This detailed 

message is laughable compared to the efficient technical language actually employed on 

ships. But when Katharine explains, “I had prepared this very signal, in case an interview 

should be necessary,” she points out what is too easy to overlook—that the message 

proved necessary and was communicated without a problem (315).  

Katharine’s signs are comical not because they are ineffective, but because they 

combine two distinct registers of language. The phrases Katharine devises are necessary 

in the polite discourse of genteel courtship and romantic love plots, but they are alien to 

the utilitarian and military language of vessels engaged in war. The juxtaposition of the 

two languages may be comically incongruous, but both discourses are necessary and 

worthwhile in their own rights. Katharine’s romantic phrases seem silly when turned into 

a utilitarian signal language; however, she is not directing a ship but subtly manipulating 

her suitor to achieve her rescue without seeming to throw herself at him. Despite her 



 

15 

dramatic situation, she needs to maintain a lady’s polite language. More than an easy 

laugh at the heroine’s expense, Katharine’s incongruous signals demonstrate how even 

the strangest languages can serve a distinct purpose, and how the varieties of English are 

as numerous as the occasions for speech. 

At many other places in the novel, Cooper calls attention to the divisive and 

contested terminology at the heart of the Americans’ conflict with England. Colonel 

Howard tells Katharine, for example, “A young lady who ventures to compare rebels 

with gallant gentlemen engaged in their duty to their prince, cannot escape the imputation 

of possessing a misguided reason,” and he goes on to inveigh against “these 

disorganizers, who would destroy every thing that is sacred—these levellers, who would 

pull down the great, to exalt the little—these jacobins, who—who―” (115). It seems 

Katharine’s previous account of her guardian’s language was quite accurate. The 

“opprobrious epithets” in this diatribe are nearly identical to the ones Katharine lists in 

her letter. Instead of focusing on the facts of the conflict and addressing the legitimate 

grievances of the rebels, Colonel Howard has become caught up in a litany of names that 

have begun to misguide his own reason. Later in the same scene, Katharine again points 

out a manipulative use of language when she discovers that Colonel Howard’s prisoners 

are “seamen,” making it likely that her beau is among them. Teasing Dillon to cover her 

concern, she accuses him of whitewashing his real apprehensions in order to keep the 

ladies at ease. She quips, “I thank you, sir, for so gentle a term [as seamen], . . . the 

imagination of Mr. Dillon is so apt to conjure the worst, that he is entitled to our praise 

for so far humouring our weakness, as not to alarm us with the apprehensions of their 

being pirates” (118). Katharine once again calls attention to the manipulation of language 



 

16 

and shows her unwillingness to be influenced by judgmental connotations passing for 

unvarnished truth. This question of the proper application of “pirate” is echoed in the 

Pilot’s first interview with Alice Dunscombe. The incognito John Paul Jones laments, 

“how powerful is the breath of the slanderer,” and exclaims, “They call me pirate! If I 

have claim to the name, it was furnished more by the paltry outfit of my friends, than by 

any act towards my enemies!” (154, 156).  

A similar conflict occurs over the term “rebellious.” In a dialogue with the 

imprisoned Manual, Borroughcliffe applies the word nonpolitically to describe a soldier’s 

unwillingness to submit: “thy knee bendeth not; nay, I even doubt if the rebellious 

member bow in prayer” (162). Led to misinterpretation by his fear of being discovered as 

an American, Manual responds, “Rebellious member, indeed! These fellows will call the 

skies of America rebellious heavens shortly!” (162). He objects to the phrase “rebellious 

member” as another example of how “rebellious” has been applied beyond its proper 

signification. When Tom Coffin speaks with the English officer Captain Borroughcliffe, 

he assigns “rebel” a positive connotation saying, “Tell them, brother, that I’m a rebel, 

will ye? and ye’ll tell ’em no lie—one that has fou’t them since Manly’s time, in Boston 

bay, to this hour” (253). Coffin inverts the usual negative meaning of “rebel” by focusing 

on the loyalty he has shown to his own cause rather than on his lack of loyalty to the 

crown.  

Coffin’s new perspective on “rebellion” is similar to Robert A. Ferguson’s 

description of the contradictory feelings Americans had about the Benedict Arnold affair 

(which forms the backdrop for The Spy). Ferguson argues: 

Arnold found his own consistency in a Revolutionary American 

discrepancy. The self-confidence of his stance relied on culture-wide 



 

17 

slippage in conceptions of loyalty. . . . The eighteenth-century duty to 

one’s king was a concrete, fixed obligation that brooked little equivocation 

or room for disobedience. . . . Emerging nationalism would soon substitute 

a new emotional power, but in 1780 the Enlightenment code of honor and 

virtue reached for universal recognition and depended as much on the 

exaltation of reason as on mass appeals to the emotions or communal 

solidarity. (140-41) 

During the Revolution, the concept of “loyalty,” and its inverse “rebellion,” became 

unmoored from their accustomed and concrete meanings. This is the same conflict of 

terminology played out between Colonel Howard and the American patriots. Ferguson 

argues that such loyalty to the idea of republican virtue was later replaced by nationalism, 

but this late-eighteenth-century version of loyalty also resembles Cooper’s complex view 

of his country. Thus, Cooper’s cosmopolitanism does not mean that he repudiates 

America, but that he puts an “Enlightenment code of honor and virtue” before 

nationalism’s “mass appeals to the emotions or communal solidarity.” Instead of marking 

American difference, Cooper advocates a cosmopolitan appreciation of linguistic 

variation and, as will become even clearer in his travelogues, a broader understanding of 

the cultured languages of Europe. 

In light of Cooper’s critique of the politicized terminology of the Revolution, the 

repetition of the phrase “plain English” throughout the novel takes on a greater 

significance. Indeed, Cooper demonstrates that “plain English” does not exist, and the 

term “English” (in a linguistic, political, or cultural sense) can prove just as problematic 

as “rebel” or “traitor.” Such a complication of what “Englishness” might have meant to 

early Americans is the subject of Leonard Tennenhouse’s book The Importance of 

Feeling English. Tennenhouse’s argument merits quotation at length: 

After the War of Independence, there is every reason to believe that 

citizens of the new United States knew—and felt keenly—that they were 



 

18 

no longer subjects of Great Britain. But it does not necessarily follow from 

this that the colonists renounced their British identity in other respects 

simply because they rejected British government. Political separation did 

not in fact cancel out the importance of one’s having come to America 

from Great Britain. Indeed, the literary evidence indicates that the newly 

liberated colonists became if anything more intent on keeping the new 

homeland as much as possible like the old one in terms of its language, 

literature, and any number of cultural practices. (2) 

While the public at large may have felt increasingly nationalistic by the time Cooper 

began his career, evidence suggests that the author made the distinction Tennenhouse 

describes here between political and cultural “Englishness.” When Cooper writes in the 

first chapter of The Pilot that its setting is significant “not only because it was the birth-

day of his nation, but because it was also the era when reason and common sense began 

to take the place of custom and feudal practices in the management of the affairs of 

nations” (11), he suggests that the real value of America lies in its democratic 

government, not in the sheer fact of its nationhood. For Cooper, an arbitrary linguistic 

separation (such as the proposal to adopt Greek as America’s official language) would 

have little significance in comparison to the important political difference between 

America and England. Accordingly, when knowing and speaking the languages of 

European monarchies does little symbolic harm, the citizens of the United States, as 

representatives of a better form of government, have everything to gain and to give in 

communication with the world. Cooper’s cosmopolitanism, then, encompasses not just 

the benefit to Americans of the richer cultural pasts of European countries, but also the 

political value that Americans can provide to Europe. Such a cosmopolitanism involves 

problematizing what “Englishness” might mean.  

Borroughcliffe often employs the term “plain English” to preface a restatement of 

something he has just expressed in a confusing mix of Latin and various circumlocutions. 



 

19 

For example, after repeatedly confusing Tom Coffin with veiled invitations to join the 

royal navy, Borroughcliffe concludes, “In plain English, enlist in my company, my fine 

fellow, and your life and liberty are both safe” (254). After regularly confusing his 

listeners, Borroughcliffe sees the necessity of “speaking plainly,” but the novel as a 

whole shows that there is no such thing. What is plain to one person or in one context 

may not be plain to another. In fact, in the above conversation, Tom Coffin has only just 

introduced himself in a way that demonstrates his own reliance on nonstandard, nautical 

language: 

“Coffin, . . . I’m called Tom, when there is any hurry, such as letting go 

the haulyards, or a sheet; long-Tom, when they want to get to windward of 

an old seaman, by fair weather; and long-Tom Coffin, when they wish to 

hail me, so that none of my cousins of the same name, about the islands, 

shall answer; for I believe the best man among them can’t measure much 

over a fathom, taking him from his head-works to his heel.” (251) 

As in the earlier examples of nautical language, this explanation of what Tom Coffin is 

called in various circumstances is confusing for a land-bound reader ignorant of 

“haulyards” and “head-works,” but it demonstrates precision, efficiency, and practicality 

for anyone versed in sea jargon. Still, the complexity of Coffin’s naming, as well as the 

admitted confusion between Tom and his “cousins of the same name,” shows that a lack 

of plainness in language can come in other forms than Borroughcliffe’s own pretentious 

quoting of Latin. Like Katharine’s signal language, the conversation presents another 

incongruous meeting of discourses, demonstrating that the many varieties of English 

make the language far from plain. And because there is no single “plain English,” only 

knowing and being conversant in a wide variety of dialects and registers can ensure one’s 

full understanding. 



 

20 

Cooper, like Royall Tyler before him, critiques the use of linguistic difference to 

distinguish “proper” Englishness from American provinciality, but he does not suggest 

that all language use is equal. Rather than emphasizing national difference, Cooper posits 

a different hierarchy of usage that transcends national borders. Unlike Tom Coffin’s 

technical language, Borroughcliffe’s use, and misuse, of Latin is portrayed quite 

critically. For example, the scene in which the young Merry enters St. Ruth disguised as a 

peddler illustrates Cooper’s idea of improper speech. When Borroughcliffe toasts “the 

statu quo ante bellum” and talks of exiting the abbey “sub silentio,” he uses Latin to 

appear more learned (300-301). Like Katharine—who quips, “And, Captain 

Borroughcliffe, as you appear to be forgetting the use of your own language, here is even 

a horn-book for you!” (303)—Cooper frowns on the deployment of linguistic difference 

as an empty sign of useless erudition rather than a utilization of real knowledge. 

At the same time, the captain is not solely a buffoon in this scene. It is he who 

unmasks Merry by revealing that the youth is proficient with nautical language but 

ignorant of a peddler’s wares. At the end of his examination, Borroughcliffe cries, 

“Enough, enough, . . . you have exhibited sufficient knowledge, to convince me that you 

do know something of your trade, and nothing of these articles” (305). Borroughcliffe’s 

pretentious use of Latin may be portrayed critically, but “plain English” is not the only 

language necessary. Borroughcliffe sees through Merry’s deception because the boy 

lacks the technical language of a peddler. But Borroughcliffe nonetheless approves of 

Merry’s nautical expertise. In this sense, Cooper’s view of proper speech and linguistic 

knowledge conforms to his analysis of the term “gentleman” in The American Democrat. 

Cooper writes, “To call a laborer, one who has neither education, manners, 



 

21 

accomplishments, tastes, associations, nor any one of the ordinary requisites, a 

gentleman, is just as absurd as to call one who is thus qualified, a fellow” (American 

Democrat 120). Cooper implies that a genuine gentleman is certainly better than a 

laboring fellow, but for a fellow to call oneself a gentleman is perhaps the worst position 

of all. True erudition in other languages, including technical terminology, is a virtue, but 

pretending to unwonted elevation is even worse than linguistic ignorance.
16

 

Although The Pilot deals only sparingly with what would commonly be called 

“foreign” language, the novel contains a thorough introduction to Cooper’s philosophy of 

linguistic difference. The multiplicity of dialects, jargons, and registers on display 

throughout the tale enables a high level of precision in the characters’ speech. It would 

hinder precise communication to replace this variety with a monolithic idea of “plain 

English.” But the same heterogeneity that allows for such precise communication also 

signals the imperfection of human language. As will become increasingly evident in the 

following readings, Cooper values broad linguistic knowledge as a way to compensate 

for the imperfect connection between names and things, between post-Babelian language 

and universal ideals. At the same time, The Pilot is also valuable for positioning Cooper’s 

general philosophy of language in the context of the American Revolution, and the 

repercussions that conflict had for American identity well into the nineteenth century. 

                                                 
16

 Cooper’s critique of the term “gentleman” also conforms to his characteristic portrayal 

of gentility. Allan M. Axelrad argues that, “although [Cooper] grew increasingly 

embittered upon his return from Europe, he was a lifelong conservative, never placing 

much faith in the judgment of the average man. Instead he placed his faith in institutions, 

in authority, and in leadership by an elite. Political power should be exercised by those 

best equipped to make sound conservative judgments—the landed gentry” (19). Dekker 

notes that “Cooper himself was an aristocrat, or as nearly one as a patriotic American 

could well be, when in 1820 he began to work on The Spy” (20). The works discussed 

below demonstrate Cooper’s belief in natural hierarchy even more clearly. 



 

22 

Cooper critiques the connection between language and national identity, instead 

advocating a class-based hierarchy of linguistic knowledge and usage, as will become 

increasingly apparent in his later works. 

Cosmopolitan Travel in Cooper’s Gleanings 

While The Pilot establishes Cooper’s approach to foreign language and translation 

in the context of the United States’ revolutionary beginnings, Cooper’s more traditional 

travelogues demonstrate the place of foreign language in early-nineteenth-century 

American travel. In 1826, only two years after the publication of The Pilot, Cooper and 

his family left America for what became a seven-year stay in Europe. Like many elite 

Americans of the period, the Coopers were continuing the British tradition of the Grand 

Tour. The practice of undertaking a comprehensive tour of Continental Europe as the 

“obligatory finish to a gentleman’s upbringing” dates as far back as Sir Philip Sidney’s 

tour of the Continent in 1572 (Trease 2-3).
17

 Foster Rhea Dulles examines American 

participation in this tradition “[a]s early as 1787,” when “two elegant young men from 

wealthy and distinguished families arrived [in Europe] with no other purpose than 

embarking on the traditional Grand Tour” (18). Although travel to Europe became 

increasingly less exclusive throughout the nineteenth century, Dulles reports that, at the 

                                                 
17

 Trease connects this originally British tradition to the necessity of crossing a body of 

water, providing a “motive for attempting a once-for-all and comprehensive exploration” 

(3). He further notes that, as new modes of transportation such as the steamship and 

railroad made Continental travel easy enough for the British that it did not require such a 

comprehensive trip, these same technologies made European tours increasingly possible 

for Americans (4). Although a version of the Grand Tour was available to a wider range 

of English citizens than the gentlemen who undertook it as a means of finishing their 

education and manners, for Americans at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 

transatlantic travel required a far greater outlay of time and money (3-4). 



 

23 

beginning of the century, “the wealthy members of society’s more exclusive circles along 

the Atlantic seaboard probably accounted for the largest number of Americans visiting 

Europe” (28). Such privileged Americans continued the tradition of European travel for 

education and cultural capital. 

Cooper’s descriptions of his European tour, published after his return, present 

further evidence of the author’s linguistic cosmopolitanism. His series of travelogues, 

which modern editors call Gleanings in Europe (1836-38), is invaluable for 

understanding Cooper’s engagement with language.
18

 By declining to replace the 

specificity of foreign terminology with an imperfect translation, Cooper emphasizes 

different languages’ potential for expressing varied nuances of meaning, encouraging the 

widest possible linguistic knowledge in order to foster the most precise and culturally 

sensitive communication. He thus rejects monolingualism as a marker of distinct national 

communities, focusing instead on how language indicates class. As a result, Cooper 

minimizes national borders and instead highlights the distinction between upper-class 

                                                 
18

 Any study of Cooper’s five volumes of travel writings is complicated by a number of 

bibliographical peculiarities. First, Cooper published the books under different titles in 

America and Europe. For greater simplicity, twentieth-century scholarly editions have 

given all five volumes the main title of Gleanings in Europe, subtitling each volume with 

the relevant country. These are the titles that I will use in the following discussion. To 

make matters even more confusing, the original order of publication was not the order of 

Cooper’s actual travels, and, as Robert E. Spiller and James F. Beard’s introduction to the 

1980 edition notes, while “some letters bear topical resemblances to actual letters,” it 

seems clear that the epistolary form is merely a device and that Cooper composed the 

volumes for publication after his return (ix). Because the attention to language in each of 

these volumes varies more consistently with the time Cooper had spent in Europe than 

with the original order of publication (as being immersed in a foreign language will be 

more striking in the early months of residence than after several years abroad), I will 

examine them on that timeline, progressing through what the modern editions of 

Gleanings in Europe subtitle France, England, Switzerland, Italy, and The Rhine, in that 

order. I abbreviate the title of each volume to Gleanings: France, Gleanings: England, 

etc. 



 

24 

cosmopolitanism and the common provinciality shared by the lower-classes of all 

countries. 

Cooper’s sea tales may have received less critical attention than his 

Leatherstocking series, but Cooper’s nonfiction travel writing has been even more widely 

ignored. When Alfred Bendixen mentions them briefly in the recent Cambridge 

Companion to American Travel Writing, he not only disregards the volumes as “lack[ing] 

any real sense of coherence,” and “often giv[ing] way to bad temper,” but he attributes 

these faults to his mistaken assumption that the books “[consist] largely of unrevised 

letters” (106-107). However, the few Cooper scholars who do take time to examine 

Gleanings are far more positive. In one of the few pieces that takes Cooper’s travel 

writing as a primary focus, J. Gerald Kennedy argues that Cooper’s Gleanings “reflect 

the evolution of a more complicated understanding of nationhood and nationality,” 

beginning “with an earnest desire to know Europe and to correct its misapprehensions 

about America” but evolving into “Cooper’s dismantling of his nation’s most cherished 

illusions about itself” (93).
19

 As Kennedy also argues, Cooper’s travel writings negotiate 

a complex relationship between country and world; the following reading will 

demonstrate that this relationship is inseparable from the subject of language. 

Before turning more specifically to language, it is worthwhile to note that 

Cooper’s Gleanings also hold an interesting place in the evolving genre of travel 

                                                 
19

 Other positive assessments include that of Thomas Philbrick, who calls Cooper’s 

achievement “travel writing which is both extraordinarily rich in ideas and coherent in 

point of view” (“Cooper in Europe”). Robert E. Spiller also highlights the interest the 

books hold for both readers and scholars, noting that they “contain some of his most 

pungent social criticism and his most brilliant natural description,” and that they replace 

the “pompousness of his formal style” with “a vital intimacy” (Fenimore 244). 



 

25 

literature and anti-touristic writing. Throughout the series, Cooper is critical both of the 

usual traveler and of the usual content of travel literature. Almost as soon as he sets foot 

in England after his transatlantic voyage, Cooper criticizes a couple “engaged in a lively 

discussion of the comparative merits of Cowes and Philadelphia,” a comparison he calls 

“absurd” (Gleanings: France 20). Cooper takes this couple as an example of a common 

fault of travelers everywhere, complaining, “This propensity to exaggerate the value of 

whatever is our own, and to depreciate that which is our neighbours’, a principle that is 

connected with the very ground-work of poor human nature, forms a material portion of 

the traveling equipage of nearly every one who quits the scenes of his own youth, to visit 

those of other people” (20). Not only does Cooper elevate himself over this general fault 

of the common rabble, but he further shows a cosmopolitan perspective by attributing the 

shortcoming to all people, not just to traveling Americans. This does not mean however, 

that Cooper defends his country at all times. When the grand duke of Florence observes 

that he has not seen so many Americans traveling recently, Cooper responds with a more 

critical view of his countrymen, saying that although “the number [of traveling 

Americans] had greatly increased within the last few years[,] . . . most of those who came 

to Europe knew little of courts, . . . did not give themselves time to see more than the 

commoner sights, and . . . were but indifferent courtiers” (Gleanings: Italy 80). Thus, 

while Cooper practices an older mode of travel where one stays for extended periods in 

high European society learning and speaking the language, he already begins to observe 

the kinds of tourists who will populate Twain’s travel writing.  



 

26 

As James Buzard explains in his study of tourism, Cooper’s elitist position was 

also, paradoxically, the norm. Buzard thus offers a valuable explanation of Cooper’s 

remarks: 

[A]fter the Napoleonic Wars, the exaggerated perception that the 

Continental tour was becoming more broadly accessible than ever before 

gave rise to new formulations about what constituted ‘authentic’ cultural 

experience (such as travel is supposed to provide) and new representations 

aimed at distinguishing authentic from spurious or merely repetitive 

experience. . . . Travel’s educative, acculturating function took on a newly 

competitive aspect, as travellers sought to distinguish themselves from the 

‘mere tourists’ they saw or imagined around them. (6) 

While travel was nowhere near as accessible as it would become by the end of the 

century, the gradual shift away from the kind of extended stay in society that Cooper 

experiences led him to exaggerate the distinction between his family and other travelers 

presumably less interested in broadening their cultural horizons. Despite Cooper’s 

observations, however, the distinction between tourists and anti-tourists is never a clear 

one. Buzard examines both tourism and anti-tourism as part of the same practice, arguing 

that the anti-touristic perspective exemplified here by Cooper shares the same goal as 

tourism itself: “making the tour pay in cultural capital accepted by home society” (196-

97). Nevertheless, the reality of Cooper’s extended residence in Europe, in contrast to the 

briefer and more rushed visits that became increasingly common in Twain’s time, makes 

him a fitting example of the older model of cosmopolitan traveler. This mode of travel 

will fade from prominence through the century, although it will never disappear entirely. 

Cooper is by no means as critical of guidebooks and other typical travel writings 

as Twain will be, but he does not miss an opportunity to find fault when fault presents 

itself. In Switzerland for example, he caustically notes: 



 

27 

I owe an especial acknowledgement to M. Ebel, for the pleasures of a long 

walk, up a hill, under a hot sun, in order to see a linden (tilleul) which he 

has written down as being thirty-six feet in diameter. What will not a 

traveller come, in time, to believe! There we went, dragging our weary 

limbs after us, to discover that for “diamètre,” we ought to have read 

“circonférence.” I wish the erratum had been in his book, instead of mine. 

(236) 

The traveler may take some blame for his credulity and dependence on such guidebooks, 

but Cooper’s editorial eye balks at the misprint. If travelogues and guidebooks (a genre to 

which Cooper himself is contributing) are not to be blindly believed, Cooper at least 

highlights his own inclusion of the “erratum” and, as always, his meticulousness in 

applying the proper names to things. Moreover, by generalizing that “[t]ravellers are too 

much in the practice of describing under the influence of their early and home-bred 

impressions” (Gleanings: Italy 228), he implies that his own writing is an exception, an 

example of accurate reporting from an open-minded and cosmopolitan perspective. 

Kennedy even goes so far as to argue that Cooper’s Gleanings “anticipate the objectives 

of current transnational studies” in Cooper’s desire to “develop a global (or at least 

transatlantic) perspective to surmount the parochial nationalism of his American 

contemporaries” (92). As these examples have indicated, however, Cooper did not limit 

his charges of such “parochialism” to Americans alone, but criticized and at times sought 

to correct the narrow nationalistic views of Americans and Europeans alike. Thus, Robert 

E. Spiller argues that, “[n]ext to American pride in themselves, European ignorance of 

America was . . . the greatest obstacle against which the culture of [Cooper’s] nation had 

to contend” (Fenimore 142). Cooper’s cosmopolitanism, like the patriotism of the 

Enlightenment, was not recognition of Europe’s absolute superiority to America, but 

belief in the value of understanding each continent and recognizing both its merits and 



 

28 

deficits, valuing the older culture of Europe without betraying the political promise of 

American democracy. 

The first volume chronologically, Gleanings in Europe: France, contains the most 

concentrated attention to language, but it also introduces many of the topics to which 

Cooper will return throughout the series. One reappearing theme is the charge of 

provincialism, which Cooper seeks to deflect from Americans in particular onto the ill-

bred people of all countries. In France, Cooper finds the practice of sending cards to be 

far superior to the American insistence on always visiting in person. He writes, “It is easy 

to trace these usages to their source, provincial habits and rustic manners, but towns with 

three hundred thousand inhabitants ought to be free from both” (194). Some American 

practices are provincial, but Cooper believes that American society has developed enough 

that such provincialisms can and ought to be dropped. Far from lampooning the lowness 

of his countrymen, however, Cooper attempts to present a balanced and accurate picture 

of America. He explains, “America, in my time, at least, has always had an active and 

swift communication with the rest of the world. As a people, we are, beyond a question, 

decidedly provincial, but our provincialism is not exactly one of external appearance” 

(22). Thus, while Americans do not have easy access to the more developed history and 

culture of Europe, they are also not walking around in buckskins all day, as many of the 

Europeans Cooper meets seem to expect. Instead, Americans prove even quicker to adopt 

French fashions than the English, a circumstance which (as Cooper is eager to report) has 

led some English travelers in America to label as backward what is really à la mode (23-



 

29 

24).
20

 Cooper values such openness to foreign culture, which even in this frivolous form 

is a marker of an international aesthetic of taste and class rather than a stubbornly 

provincial nationalism. 

Cooper displays his own cosmopolitanism by including many French words and 

phrases in his account, a practice he will continue in Homeward Bound. One letter 

describing a royal dinner serves as a good example of Cooper’s treatment of language 

throughout both the volume and the series. In the first six paragraphs of the letter, Cooper 

explains two French phrases: “the lord in waiting, or, as he is called here, ‘le premier 

gentilhomme de la chambre du roi, de service’” (158), and “grands courverts, as these 

dinners are called” (161). Cooper emphasizes the French versions with his explicit 

attention to what things are “called” and, in the first example, his use of quotation marks 

to highlight the French phrase. He implies that, when in France, it is important to use the 

French terminology. And while these examples offer more translation than is usual for 

Cooper, they still show no attempt to give a “literal,” word-for-word translation of the 

French terms. Presumably, readers can do that for themselves. Also in these paragraphs, 

the words “fête,” “salle,” “châtea,” and “gardes du corps” are left with no translation at 

all (158-59). These examples demonstrate that, while Cooper at times seeks to inform his 

                                                 
20

 After giving an example of dancing formation, Cooper writes, “In this little anecdote 

we learn the great rapidity with which new fashions penetrate American usages, and the 

greater ductility of American society in visible and tangible things, at least; and the 

heedless manner with which even those who write in a good spirit of America jump to 

their conclusions. Had Captain Hall, or Mrs. Trollope, encountered this unlucky 

quadrille, they would probably have found some clever means of imputing the nez-à-nez 

tendencies of our dances to the spirit of democracy!” (Gleanings: France 24). 



 

30 

reader about the nomenclature of French society, he assumes there is no need to translate 

the French language itself.
 21

 

Cooper further demonstrates his tendency to avoid translation by leaving dialogue 

in French without any English explanation. For example, in describing the women 

present at the dinner, Cooper reports: 

One, of great personal charms and quite young, was seated near me, and 

my neighbor, an old abbé, carried away by enthusiasm, suddenly 

exclaimed to me—“Quelle belle fortune! Monsieur, d’être jeune, jolie, et 

duchesse!” I dare say the lady had the same opinion of the matter. (167) 

French fluency may not be necessary to understand the gist of this anecdote, but some 

reading knowledge is required for full comprehension. By concluding this passage with 

his own dry punch line rather than offering any commentary on the meaning of the 

French remark, Cooper requires the reader to be conversant in the language in order to 

feel included in the joke. A second exchange with his neighbor offers another example of 

this characteristic treatment of dialogue: 

I asked my neighbor, the Abbé, what he thought of M. de Talleyrand. 

After looking up in my face distrustfully, he whispered—“Mais, Monsier, 

c’est un chat qui tombe toujours sur ses pieds,” a remark that was literally 

true to-night, for the old man was kept on his feet longer than could have 

been agreeable to the owner of two such gouty legs. (173) 

Once again, Cooper’s joke is nonsensical without enough knowledge of French to 

recognize the common saying. By not offering any translation, Cooper seems to assume 

that his reader is cosmopolitan enough to understand how the “remark . . . was literally 

true.” At least Cooper does not seem to care if he alienates a reader who is not. But 

                                                 
21

 It is important to note, however, that it is not impossible to find fault with Cooper’s 

French, however proud the author appears to be of it. Spiller notes, for example, that “the 

French manuscripts of Cooper are improved, as Mark Twain has put it, by being 

retranslated back into their native tongue” (Fenimore 83). 



 

31 

perhaps such a feeling of being excluded might encourage the monolingual to improve 

their linguistic knowledge. 

Amid these far more numerous examples of untranslated French, Cooper 

occasionally does provide a translation, but only in cases where the translated meaning is 

of utmost importance. In one of the few examples of such translation, Cooper describes a 

noble family “who were content to bear the appellation of Sire, a word from which our 

own ‘Sir’ is derived, and which means, like Sir, the simplest term of courtesy that could 

be used” (164). Already in setting up his story, Cooper explains the French usage. He 

goes on to describe how the family demonstrate their “contempt for titles” in their motto, 

which Cooper sets off from the text as follows: 

“Je ne suis roi, ne prince, ne duc, ne comte aussi; 

       Je suis le Sire de Coucy.” (165) 

To this, Cooper footnotes the translation, “I am neither king, nor prince, nor duke, nor 

even a count: I am M. de Coucy” (165). Even in this example, Cooper minimizes the 

obtrusiveness of the English translation by removing it from the main text and allowing 

readers to consult it or not, depending upon their linguistic knowledge. The significance 

of this motto, in comparison to the amusing but tangential comments of the Abbé, 

becomes clear when Cooper offers his own version, to be used by “our own ministers and 

citizens abroad” (165). Cooper advises: 

If any prince should inquire—“Who is this that approaches me, clad so 

simply that I may mistake him for a butler, or a groom of the chambers?” 

let him answer, “Je ne suis roi, ne prince, ne duc, ne comte aussi—I am 

the minister of the United States of Amerikey,” and leave the rest to the 

millions at home. (165) 

Cooper’s adaptation of the motto encapsulates the patriotic pride in American democracy 

that Cooper demonstrates throughout his travels, a pride which will only be soured upon 



 

32 

his eventual return home. Despite its provincial and often illogical usages, America’s lack 

of titles is not a mark of rusticity but a symbol of its political sophistication. By 

recognizing this distinction, Cooper once again emphasizes his republican patriotism, in 

contrast to the later nationalism of presumed cultural and linguistic superiority. And it is 

only the significance of this point that warrants the unusual instance of translation.
22

 

Cooper’s pride in knowing French further can be seen in his account of meeting 

Sir Walter Scott. Cooper describes how he encounters a stranger at the entrance of his 

building: 

“Est-ce Monsieur ——, que j’ai l’honneur de voir?” he asked, in French, 

and with but an indifferent accent. “Monsieur, je m’appele ——.” “Eh 

bien, donc—je suis Walter Scott.” (207) 

Despite Cooper’s apparent admiration for the writer, his account of Scott’s French is far 

from complimentary, both in Cooper’s overt comment about Scott’s “indifferent accent” 

and in the general stuttering quality he gives to Scott’s speech. Cooper heightens the 

sense of Scott’s linguistic incompetence with the following observation: 

All this time he was speaking French, while my answers and remarks were 

in English. Suddenly recollecting himself, he said—“Well, here have I 

been parlez-vousing to you, in a way to surprise you no doubt; but these 

Frenchmen have got my tongue so set to their lingo, that I have half 

forgotten my own language.” (208) 

                                                 
22

 Another rare translation also appears for a French saying to which Cooper attaches 

much importance. Beforehand, Cooper complains of Americans’ “tendency to repel every 

suggestion of inferiority” and calls this “one of the surest signs of provincial habits” 

(236). He concludes his explanation (or rather, his lesson) with the statement: “The 

French have a clever and pithy saying, that of — ‘On peut tout dire, à un grand people.’ 

‘One may tell all to a great nation.’” (236). In other words, America’s failure to take 

criticism with grace suggests its inferiority. Not only does Cooper feel quite strongly 

about this issue, as his lampooning of similar provincialism in Home as Found 

demonstrates, but the reader most in need of this advice would be one ignorant of French 

(if any such readers have remained to reach this point). 



 

33 

Here, Scott is doubly foolish. Not only does he lack Cooper’s apparent ease in switching 

between languages, but that failure exposes his lackluster French. And this is a subject 

that Cooper proves unwilling to drop throughout the letter. In another anecdote, Scott 

asks Cooper to decipher an invitation. Scott says, “you are a friend of the lady, and 

parlez-vous so much better than I, can you tell me whether this is for jeudi, or lundi, or 

mardi, or whether it means no day at all?” (212). As if to highlight how much better he 

does “parlez-vous,” Cooper drily follows this with the deadpan, “I told him the day of the 

week intended” (212). Only several pages later, Cooper again reports Scott’s linguistic 

failure: “He said, laughingly, that he spoke French with so much difficulty he was 

embarrassed to answer the compliments” (216). Again emphasizing the superiority of his 

own French, Cooper follows this with another anecdote in which, as in his description of 

the royal dinner, he leaves the French comments made to him untranslated, even at the 

risk of obscuring the central point of the story. Summarizing his opinion of Scott, Cooper 

writes, for a “man who had been so very much and so long courted by the great,” he 

sometimes demonstrates “a want of familiarity with the world,” but “after all, his life has 

been provincial” (213). Cooper never quite mocks or insults Scott in Gleanings, but he 

makes it abundantly clear that, while the Briton might surpass him in fame, it is the 

American who can converse in France without a problem.
23

 For Cooper, literary merit is 

hollow without such cosmopolitan markers of class. 

Gleanings: France contains other, more overt statements of Cooper’s views of 

language. He says of the French, for example, “Like the people of all great nations, their 

                                                 
23

 Stephen P. Harthorn’s paper “Truth and Consequences: James Fenimore Cooper on 

Scott, Columbus, Bumppo, and Professional Authorship” examines Cooper’s sometimes 

harsh criticism of Scott more broadly. 



 

34 

attention is drawn more to themselves than to others, and then the want of a knowledge of 

foreign languages has greatly contributed to their ignorance” (219). This deficit does not 

damn the French entirely for Cooper, but his disapproval is clear as he goes on to speak 

positively of how the younger generation is beginning to remedy the shortcoming. For 

Cooper, the French people’s ignorance of other languages is a key cause of their greater 

failings. He explains that “the limited powers of the language, and the rigid laws to which 

it has been subjected, contribute to render the French less acquainted with foreign 

nations, than they would otherwise be” (220). In describing this limitation, Cooper gives 

what amounts to a defense of his general policy on the inclusion of foreign languages in 

his own works. He explains: 

In all their translations, there is an effort to render the word, however 

peculiar may be its meaning, into the French tongue. Thus, “township,” 

and “city,” met with in an American book, would probably be rendered by 

“canton,” or “commune,” or “ville”; neither of which conveys an accurate 

idea of the thing intended. In an English or American book, we should 

introduce the French word at once, which would induce the reader to 

inquire into the differences that exist between the minor territorial division 

of his own country, and those of the country of which he is reading. In this 

manner is the door opened for further information, until both writers and 

readers come to find it easier and more agreeable to borrow words from 

others, than to curtain their ideas by their national vocabularies. The 

French, however, are beginning to feel their poverty in this respect, and 

some are already bold enough to resort to the natural cure. (220) 

Because of the importance the French put on their own language and culture, they avoid 

including any foreign words in their translations. As a result, Cooper argues, other 

cultures become indistinguishable from French culture, and thus the French people 

remain ignorant of other countries’ ways. Cooper, in contrast, not only emphasizes the 

cultural differences between nations, but insists that these differences be represented by 

using the proper words for things. Thus, the English word “township” would signify the 



 

35 

American concept better than any French equivalent could, and vice versa. By traversing 

the narrow bounds of linguistic nationalism, writers have access to more varied 

vocabulary to express their precise meanings. This practice, as I have argued, can be seen 

throughout Cooper’s travel writings, both fictional and nonfictional. What makes this 

passage even more significant, however, is Cooper’s account of his pedagogical rationale. 

He argues that including a French word in an English-language text will lead the reader 

to wonder about the differences between townships and villes, encouraging them to learn 

more about those differences and to acquire more foreign vocabulary. Cooper calls the 

lack of such linguistic and cultural knowledge “poverty,” and he clearly takes pains to 

avoid such a shortcoming in his own writing.
24

 

Cooper’s travels to England provide further opportunities to debunk the binary of 

American provinciality and European sophistication. Cooper is particularly critical of the 

English, so his observations take on a less favorable cast. Looking at Cooper’s references 

to linguistic difference in Gleanings in Europe: England, Spiller calls “Cooper’s main 

theme, a comparison of the cultures of the two countries in terms of the speech of the 

various social classes in each” (“Cooper’s Notes” 298). Indeed, throughout the work, 

Cooper provides observations on language supporting his view that there is a greater 

intranational difference between speakers of different classes than there is between 

                                                 
24

 Kennedy similarly notes Cooper’s desire to educate his readers: “When he began 

Gleanings, Cooper fancied himself embarking on a new career as a cultural critic. He 

hoped his nonfiction writing would enjoy success, but above all he meant to combat 

ignorance at home and abroad, correcting American self-delusions and enlightening 

native readers about Europe while aiming (through foreign editions) to provide European 

readers with revealing views of the countries he had visited” (95-96). 



 

36 

speakers of equivalent classes on each side of the Atlantic.
25

 As David Simpson argues 

about Cooper’s works more generally, “language is imagined as a symptom (and indeed a 

cause) of struggle and conflict within the social contract” (Politics 251). Language, for 

Cooper, thus serves as a marker of class rather than a divider of national communities.  

Early in Gleanings: England, Cooper describes a conversation between himself 

and three Englishmen. They discuss whether it is possible to determine if someone is 

American or English from that person’s speech: 

The two oldest gentlemen professed not to be able to discover any thing in 

my manner of speaking to betray me for a foreigner. But the young 

gentleman fancied otherwise. “He thought there was something peculiar—

provincial—he did not know what exactly.” I could have helped him to the 

word—“something that was not cockney.” . . . The difference between the 

enunciation of Mr. Rogers and Mr. Cary and one of our educated men of 

the middle states, it is true, was scarcely perceptible, and required a nice 

ear and some familiarity with both countries to detect, but the young man 

could not utter a sentence, without showing his origin. (31) 

Cooper, who considers himself an expert on the differences between English and 

American language, can hear a difference in the speech of Roger and Cary, but their 

common high level of education makes such a difference extremely small. The young 

man, who apparently speaks with a “cockney” accent, a term Cooper uses throughout his 

travels to express contempt for things of a lower class, mistakenly believes that the lack 

of such an accent is “provincial.” But, as Cooper is quick to insist, his own educated 

American English is far more proper than the youth’s British English, and a sign of its 

                                                 
25

 Numerous critics have sought to explain Cooper’s seemingly contradictory beliefs in 

democracy and in important distinctions of class, breeding, and merit. According to Ross 

J. Pudaloff, Cooper felt that “the great promise of America” was “the achievement of a 

hierarchical society and a democratic polity” (714). Likewise, McWilliams notes 

Cooper’s views that, “in a democracy, the gentry should be voted into power” and that 

“the gentry are usually the natural and social superiors of the common man” (Political 

195). 



 

37 

correctness is the relative absence of national markers. Cooper seems to find something 

shameful in the young man’s “showing his origin” in every sentence, and prides himself 

that his own cosmopolitan correctness prevents such gauche disclosures. 

Similar observations can be found throughout the volume. At a dinner party 

hosted by Lord Grey, Cooper insists that the British company’s “manner of speaking is 

identically the same as our own,” adding “(I speak now of the gentlemen of the Middle 

States)” but also including “that portion of those in the Southern who live much in the 

towns” (121). For Cooper, the upper classes of both countries share the qualities of 

directness and simplicity in language because of their “[c]ommunion with the world” 

(121). Elsewhere in the text, Cooper complains of the “many abuses of the language, in 

the middling classes” in England (171). One such abuse is the pronunciation of “my.” 

Cooper asserts that “the polite way of pronouncing this word . . . [is] by a sort of 

elision—as ‘m’horse,’” and he concludes “that ‘my horse,’ ‘my dog,’ ‘my gun,’ the usual 

American mode, and ‘me horse,’ ‘me dog,’ ‘me gun,’ the English counterpart, are equally 

wrong; the first by an offensive egotism, and the last from offensive ignorance” (171). 

Thus, Cooper places the genteel and correct usage, which is shared by the “better sort” in 

both countries, above the common usages of each. In another conversation about 

language differences between England and America, Cooper explains, “I told him we had 

social castes in America, as in England, though they were less strongly marked than 

common; and that men, of course, betrayed their associations in nothing sooner than in 

their modes of speech” (289). For Cooper in this last as in the previous examples, 

language difference between countries is less significant than verbal distinctions of class. 



 

38 

By making this claim, Cooper elevates himself above the common, provincial American, 

placing himself on a plane with the best of Europe.  

Gleanings: Switzerland, the middle book chronologically (although the first 

published), holds an interesting position between the books on France and England and 

Cooper’s later travels. Cooper describes the difference in subject matter at the opening of 

the volume, rejoicing that “a commonplace converse with men was about to give place to 

a sublime communion with nature” (5). While Switzerland is more touristic than France, 

in which much of Cooper’s observations deal with his time residing in the country and 

moving in French society, it contains more examples of linguistic difference than 

Cooper’s even more touristic accounts of Italy and the Rhine. 

When Cooper encounters French in Gleanings: Switzerland, his treatment of the 

language is similar to that in Gleanings: France, but travel in Switzerland also presents a 

new linguistic challenge—German. At first, Cooper is optimistic about his ability to 

understand German. He explains, for example: 

The town on the Swiss side of the river is called Kaiserstuhl, or Emperor’s 

seat; the good Franz being called a Kaiser, a corruption of Cæsar, in the 

vernacular of his lieges. Stuhl speaks for itself; being pronounced like our 

own stool. They who speak English, by a little attention to sounds, can 

soon acquire a very respectable travelling German. (79) 

Even ignoring the issue of false cognates (the English and German versions of “gift” 

being one notorious example), Cooper’s implication that all German will be as easy to 

decipher as stuhl is overly optimistic. Such optimism is also indicative of Cooper’s 

cosmopolitan belief that he should be able to converse in any language. Despite this 

hopeful beginning, the volume contains numerous examples of misunderstandings 

brought about by a combination of the Coopers’ lack of skill with German and the 



 

39 

numerous and obscure dialects of the region. In the very next letter, the Coopers meet 

with “a serious difficulty” in Altstetten, a small town in which, Cooper writes, “we could 

not make ourselves understood” (91). He admits that part of the fault is his own and that 

his “German was by no means classical,” but he also lays some of the blame on the lack 

of worldliness of the town, writing, “English, Italian, and French, were all Hebrew to the 

good people of the inn” (91). Cooper admits some fault in not having mastered German, 

but he still continues to emphasize his own linguistic arsenal in comparison to the town’s 

provinciality. Further highlighting the fault of the townspeople, Cooper notes that, even 

though his coachman “spoke as pure a patois as heart could wish[,] . . . the patios of the 

district would own no fellowship with that of this linguist” (91). Even in the face of his 

own shortcomings (and he is the visitor, after all), Cooper continues to offset these 

difficulties by highlighting his linguistic cosmopolitanism. He overcomes this particular 

language difficulty, for example, by resorting to “the language of nature” and “crow[ing] 

like a cock” to indicate that his party would like something to eat, a tactic that succeeds in 

procuring “a broiled fowl, an omelette, and boiled eggs” as well as in entertaining all at 

the inn (91). Cooper’s onomatopoeia proves successful in addressing his needs, but it also 

lacks the precision of more specific terminology, procuring him a wider variety of 

chicken-related food than would have been necessary. Cooper is obviously capable of 

laughing at himself for the caper, but the anecdote also reveals no small pride in his 

ability to communicate despite the language barrier. 

When the local language is a dialect of French and not German, Cooper is even 

quicker to elevate his acquired but “proper” French over the native but “provincial” 

French of the people he encounters. One example is the following miscommunication: 



 

40 

I asked the waiter, who spoke French, for some pears. “Pois! des petits 

pois!” he roared; “why, monsir, the peas have been gone these six weeks.” 

“ I do not ask for ‘pois,’ but for ‘poires,’ ‘des poir-r-es,’ which are just in 

season.” One would think this explanation sufficient, and that I might have 

been quietly answered, yes or no;—not at all. My sturdy Swiss very coolly 

turned upon me, and gave me to understand that reason he had not 

comprehended me at first was my very bad pronunciation. “Fous n’abez 

bas un bon bronunciashun, Monsir; voilà, poirquoi je ne fous ai bas 

combris.” Certes, my French is any thing but faultless, though I have no 

reason to suppose it worse than that of my castigator, who made a most 

ludicrous appearance as he reproved me for calling a pear, peas; an 

offense, by-the-way, of which I was not at all guilty. (175) 

Cooper may have laughed along with the women of the inn when he was forced to resort 

to animal sounds to order food, but he obviously finds the effrontery of this waiter 

inexcusable. From his first “roared” response, the waiter behaves in a way that is both 

utterly uncivil and uncivilized, at least according to Cooper’s account of the 

confrontation. When Cooper responds by repeating and slowing down his words as if the 

waiter was the foreigner, it is no surprise that his “castigator” does not drop the issue but 

instead insults Cooper’s pronunciation. Unfortunately for the Swiss waiter, the writer has 

the power to print the last word, and not only does Cooper end the anecdote by claiming 

his own innocence (although we have nothing but his word to determine how faultless his 

pronunciation might have been), but he also wields the power of phonetic spelling to 

mark the waiter’s speech as nonstandard and incorrect. Whatever Cooper’s own linguistic 

faults may be, he never represents them by altering the spellings of his own speech. 

By the time Cooper reaches the “hamlet” of Disentis, remarking that “village” 

would be “too significant a word for this local capital,” he seems frustrated enough with 

these repeated communication difficulties to lay all of the blame on the provinciality of 

the inhabitants, “a people who spoke a patois known only to themselves” (202). Cooper 

describes how he is startled awake one night by a strange man at his bedside: 



 

41 

To all and each of my questions, however, nothing could be got out of him 

but the single word, “serviteur,” which he pronounced more and more 

deliberately each time. This ridiculous scene lasted several minutes before 

I began to suspect the truth. It would seem that the honest landlord, 

distressed at not being able to comprehend my wants, had sent for an 

interpreter, who happened to be the worthy and sententious individual in 

question. (204) 

Cooper concludes this amusing anecdote with what amounts to the joke that the people of 

Disentis are so provincial (how provincial are they?), that their greatest “linguist” knows 

“but one word of a foreign language, and that one, too, far from particularly well” (204). 

In his account of the next day, Cooper again contrasts his own linguistic prowess to that 

of the village. He describes exploring the abbey, “in hope of meeting a monk, with whom 

[he] might, at least, murder the little Latin that a busy and varied life has spared” (205). 

As in many of the previous examples, Cooper’s modesty about his “little Latin” is far 

from convincing. But his desire for conversation is thwarted again, and he laments, “the 

‘serviteur’ of the linguist was the only intelligible word which had greeted my ear since I 

entered the place” (205). Despite his attempts at modesty, Cooper demonstrates a clear 

pattern of displaying his linguistic skills whenever possible and emphasizing, when he 

does experience communication difficulties, that the fault lies in the rusticity of the 

locals, not in his own shortcomings. 

Cooper’s account of his visit to Italy is the most properly touristic of all of his 

writings; as Kennedy notes, it “savors of guidebook notations, many of them happily 

invested with Cooper’s critical intelligence and unaffected delight” (116). Cooper admits 

near the end of the volume, “I have told you little in these letters of the Italians 



 

42 

themselves, and nothing of what may be called their society” (Gleanings: Italy 295).
26

 

His avoidance of Italian society gives him fewer opportunities to remark on the language 

of the country. When he does, the comments are similar to the more numerous examples 

from his earlier travels. He praises Florence, for example, by saying, “This is the age of 

cosmopolitanism, real or pretended; and Florence, just at this moment, is an epitome both 

of its spirit and of its representatives” (23). Cooper also derives much amusement from 

the speech of common people with local dialects. One example is a lad rowing a boat 

from Amalfi to Salerno who “amused [them] greatly with his patios” by pronouncing 

“Signore” as “snore” (157). Cooper notes his son’s “great delight” at the incident and 

concludes with the image of the more worldly American family laughing at the local 

lad’s provinciality. Finally, Cooper again demonstrates the significance of linguistic 

difference when he praises the speech of the “females of Rome,” particularly “[t]he 

manner in which they pronounce that beautiful and gracious word ‘grazie’” (230). He 

continues: 

A French woman’s “merci” is pretty, but it is mincing, and not at all equal 

to the Roman “thanks.” After all, as language is the medium of thought, 

and the link that connects all our sympathies, there is no more desirable 

accomplishment than a graceful utterance. (230) 

As Cooper demonstrates throughout his travel writings, it is worthwhile for a writer to 

print and a reader to understand foreign words because “thanks” in French is not exactly 

                                                 
26

 Interestingly, Emilio Goggio’s explanation of this omission, that while “Cooper had 

lived among the Italians for a long time, he hesitated to pass judgment upon their 

character and nature for fear that his knowledge of them might not be sufficiently 

thorough to do so adequately” (70), further demonstrates the importance Cooper places 

on speaking the language and living in society for an extended residence. Even though 

his visit was longer than that of many who would not hesitate to comment freely, Cooper 

was unwilling to make judgments based on insufficient cultural knowledge. 



 

43 

equivalent to “thanks” in Italian. When both are translated into English, an important 

difference is lost. Because he believes “language is the medium of thought,” Cooper 

emphasizes the importance of “graceful utterance,” but he also implies here, as 

elsewhere, that the original language of the utterance conveys a greater precision of 

meaning than is possible with any translation. 

Perhaps because it documents the last chronological period of Cooper’s travels, 

Gleanings: The Rhine contains more observations of a long-time resident than of a 

traveler and thus fewer observations about language. The language anecdotes it does 

contain, as in the Italian volume, reinforce the argument for Cooper’s general interest in 

the subject. For example, Cooper takes time to comment on Flemish and finds, “So 

nearly does this language resemble the English, that I have repeatedly comprehended 

whole sentences, in passing through the streets” (96). Cooper also continues his subtle 

linguistic competition with Scott by noting that his colleague mistakenly has the people 

of Liége speak Flemish instead of the “impure French, which is the language of the whole 

region along this frontier” (106). Cooper ostensibly undercuts his criticism by 

concluding, “But for the complaints of the Liégeois, the error would not have been very 

generally known, however; certainly not by me, had I not visited the place” (107). But 

once again, this feigned modesty only further emphasizes the greater worldliness Cooper 

himself has gained through his extensive travels. 

In sum, Gleanings in Europe does much to illuminate Cooper’s opinions of 

language and of the relation between America and Europe. Like The Pilot, it also presents 

a complex mixture of patriotic pride and cosmopolitanism. Cooper demonstrates that 

cosmopolitanism is a trait of elite Americans and Europeans alike, and that provinciality 



 

44 

is a mark of the lower classes rather than a national characteristic. Cooper also seeks to 

vindicate his country from charges of provincialism by speaking the languages of Europe 

and by following each country’s social customs. He conveys this appreciation for 

linguistic and cultural difference by saturating his own writings with foreign language, 

not merely to add a meaningless patina of local color, but because he believes that 

language makes a difference and that the reader can be improved through exposure to that 

difference. Linguistic difference may cause difficulties for the traveler, but Cooper 

contends that it should be overcome through broad linguistic knowledge and education 

rather than elided through translation or ignored by shutting down opportunities for 

transnational communication. In his later fiction, Cooper will begin to draw an even 

greater distinction between his own cosmopolitanism and that of the average American, 

thereby alienating much of his former audience. 

Elite Cosmopolitanism in Homeward Bound 

When faced in Europe with negative views of America and of democracy, Cooper 

maintained the strong patriotism evident in his early Revolutionary novels.
27

 But after his 

return to America in 1833, he found that the country he spent years defending had 

changed for the worse. As Robert S. Levine explains, “Various social controversies—the 

                                                 
27

 As Dekker points out, because “the nation as a whole had accepted Jeffersonian 
Republicanism” and “(by 1827) Cooper had gone along with it,” he remained “far to the 

left of most of the governing powers of Europe” (109). Thus, it is important to keep in 

mind that, while Cooper was conservative by American standards, his general belief in 

his country’s mode of government put him on the left in Europe. Illustrating the 

complexity of Cooper’s views, Robert S. Levine argues that “Cooper’s early novels 

express an implicit pessimism about America’s prospects that he would not address 

openly and deliberately until after 1833,” but that, “during his European residence of 
1826-33, he conceived of himself as a spokesman for the glorious possibilities of 

American republicanism” (69). 



 

45 

dispute over Three Mile Point, his legal battles with the press, his disdain for Anti-

Rentism—led him to feel increasingly alienated from the very public he hoped would 

purchase and read his novels” (100). The process of compiling his recollections into 

Gleanings in Europe, moreover, may have fostered unfortunate comparisons between 

their subject and his home. As Robert Lawson-Peebles argues, Cooper’s travel writings 

allowed him to develop “a richer, more complex, and even more negative view of 

American society” (348). In 1838, after a three-year break from fiction writing, Cooper 

published another sea tale, Homeward Bound, which is set in Cooper’s present and 

describes the Effingham family’s own return from Europe. Homeward Bound 

demonstrates how Cooper’s experiences abroad developed the perspectives on language 

found in The Pilot. The later novel also amplifies the class consciousness found in 

Cooper’s earlier works, carefully distinguishing the cosmopolitanism of the Effinghams 

(and the Coopers) from the provincial views of the American rabble. 

Homeward Bound and its sequel, Home as Found, are often read as markers of 

Cooper’s changing political views. Marilla Battilana describes how, after his return from 

Europe, Cooper “became one of the loudest and most argumentative critics of U.S. 

things, government, people and culture,” and she describes the novels as “brimming with 

aristocratic feelings and distrust with American institutions” (220, 227).
28

 Likewise, 

Ronald John Clohessy notes that Homeward Bound marks “a shift from a Jacksonian 

                                                 
28

 Levine modifies the common perception that Cooper “suddenly became an inveterate 

social critic, perceiving little but demagoguery and commercialism all around him” (96). 

Instead, Levine argues that “the transformation was a political-rhetorical one, pivoting as 

it did on his changing attitude toward his democratic reading public. . . . According to 

Cooper, the subsequent decline of his contemporary reputation had everything to do with 

politics: Defending republican and democratic ideals, he was misunderstood in what 

Marvin Meyers has termed ‘the Age of Dodge and Bragg’” (99). 



 

46 

sense of democracy found in the early novels to a more Jeffersonian notion of an 

aristocracy of merit.” While many of Cooper’s critics found him to be unapologetically 

aristocratical, Clohessy’s more balanced perspective reveals that Cooper was not anti-

American, as the newspapers portrayed him, but that he did believe a successful republic 

requires its citizens to discriminate between persons on the basis of quality.
29

 John P. 

McWilliams, in perhaps the most nuanced interpretation of Cooper’s shifting political 

viewpoint, offers the following psychological reading of the Effingham brothers: 

Among Cooper’s novels only Homeward Bound and Home As Found 

divide the American gentleman into two characters who disagree with one 

another. Edward and John Effingham represent Cooper’s changeable 

feelings during the troubled years of the late thirties. . . . Benign, 

optimistic, and self-contained, Edward offers temperate and assuring 

statements which Cooper very much wished to believe. His angry cynical 

cousin utters denunciations which Cooper wished not to believe, but 

which were to recur in later writings. (Political 229) 

It does seem likely that the reason scholars disagree about Cooper’s politics, particularly 

during this critical period, is that Cooper’s beliefs were in conflict with his hopes for 

America. While Cooper’s allegiance may have been divided between the Effingham 

brothers, both men are admirable in their own rights, and the conflict between them can 

produce fruitful dialogue. The novel positions such polite and well-reasoned discussion 

as perhaps the only path to solving the problems Cooper observed upon his return from 

Europe, and the ability to engage in such discussion is one marker of Cooper’s natural 

and cosmopolitan aristocrat. 

As the following reading will make clear, the gentility required for balanced 

discourse is impossible without a cosmopolitan education, whether that education be 

                                                 
29

 Likewise, McWilliams asserts, “In dealing with Cooper, one must separate his 

aristocratic social convictions from his republican political convictions” (Political 29). 



 

47 

formal or based on real-word experience. Both the benefit and the marker of such an 

education is knowledge of multiple languages. Cooper himself proudly displays such 

knowledge with the foreign phrases interspersed throughout the speech of the genteel 

characters and the narration itself, as well as in the more extended French of 

Mademoiselle Viefville. Cooper contrasts this linguistic cosmopolitanism with the 

ungentlemanly speech and behavior of the lower-class characters such as the maid Anne 

Sidley, who is unable to learn French and dislikes anything said by Eve she cannot 

understand, and the steward Saunders, whose speech is marked by comically incorrect 

foreign phrases and mispronunciations.
30

 

While it is in the sequel, Home as Found, that Cooper has the most opportunity to 

satirize everything he finds deficient upon his return to America, the characters aboard 

the Montauk frequently pass the time comparing the merits of America and Europe. As 

the narration notes, “the conflicts between American and British opinions, coupled with a 

difference in habits, are a prolific source of discontent in the cabins of packets” (I: 38). 

Indeed, the first sentence of the novel is a comparison of the coasts of England and 

America, and it favors the former for its “general appearance of civilisation” (I: 7). This 

comparison is continued in a conversation between Eve and her father. Edward 

Effingham muses, “We have seen nobler coasts, Eve, . . . but, after all, England will 

always be fair to American eyes” (I: 8). He further demonstrates his preference for 

Europe when he expresses pride that Eve is “educated beyond the reach of national 

                                                 
30

 In a paper on Cooper’s use of Scots dialect, Signe O. Wegener similarly points out that 

“Cooper, always the novelist of manners, insists that the higher a person’s social rank, the 

more superior and less accented his or her use of the English language—and also their 

command of other languages. In his texts, language becomes an inescapable social 

marker.” 



 

48 

foibles” (I: 8). Indeed, Eve’s education has made her cosmopolitan, and she describes 

herself as “independent of prejudice” (I: 8). Her cousin, John Effingham, likewise praises 

her for being educated by “a congress of nations,” and he pays particular attention to 

Eve’s knowledge of languages, which will garner widespread admiration upon her return 

to America in Home as Found (I: 9).
31

 These opening remarks set the tone for a novel 

that espouses cosmopolitan ideals and assumes a reader as cosmopolitan as its 

protagonists. 

Newspaperman Steadfast Dodge, in sharp contrast to the cosmopolitan 

Effinghams, is the emblem of everything that Cooper finds distasteful in 1830s America. 

Most readings of Cooper’s novel pay particular attention to his character, and there is 

little doubt what Cooper thought of this scurrilous figure. Daniel Marder calls Dodge an 

“ill-mannered, arrogant and ignorant usurper of republican virtues” (26). Dekker, 

likewise, calls the editor “a cowardly, sneaking, lying fictional descendent of Hiram 

Doolittle of The Pioneers, a ‘Man of the People’” (155). Others, such as Joel A. Johnson, 

connect Dodge to Cooper’s dislike of New Englanders. Johnson calls him “an ardent 

New England democrat . . . so devoted to equality and the rights of the people that he has 

difficulty thinking for himself” (138). Of more importance to the present argument is 

David Simpson’s reading of Dodge. Simpson argues that Dodge is an example of what 

                                                 
31

 An extreme example of the recognition her linguistic knowledge receives is Mrs. 

Legend’s preparations for Eve’s appearance at one of the former’s “literary evenings”: 

“[I]t was known that Eve was skilled in most of the European tongues, and, the good 

lady, not feeling that such accomplishments are chiefly useful as a means, looked about 

her in order to collect a set, among whom our heroine might find some one with whom to 

converse in each of her dialects” (Cooper, Home as Found I: 92-93). Less admiringly, 

another minor character gossips, “Eve Effingham has lived so long in France, that she 

speaks nothing but broken English” (II: 18). 



 

49 

Cooper did not like about New Englanders who believed “everyone must conform to the 

New England standard” of language (Politics 187). Dodge’s hypocrisy on the subject of 

language is apparent in his own provincial speech. Simpson notes that, in the novel, 

“[w]hole pages are given over to the transcription of Dodge’s linguistic misdeeds, and the 

disdain they occasion in the truly polite characters” (187-88).  

Dodge’s provincial opinions about the English language are matched only by his 

provincial opinions of Europe. Cooper uses Dodge’s travel journal, which the newspaper 

editor already has sent back home for publication, to satirize the typical travel writings of 

American tourists who make snap judgments, fail to learn the language, and cannot see 

through their own prejudices. To the dismay of the Effinghams, Dodge begins to read 

from the journal of his visit to Paris: 

“‘Dejjuned at ten, as usual, an hour, that I find exceedingly unreasonable 

and improper, and one that would meet with general disapprobation in 

America. I do not wonder that a people gets to be immoral and depraved 

in their practices, who keep such improper hours. The mind acquires 

habits of impurity, and all the sensibilities become blunted, by taking the 

meals out of the natural seasons. I impute much of the corruption of 

France to the periods of the day in which the food is taken— ’” (I: 187) 

In a typical display of his excessively democratic ideas, Dodge disapproves of the French 

breakfast hour because it would be met “with general disapprobation in America” 

(emphasis added). Dodge further ignores the arbitrary relativity of cultural differences 

when he calls such timing not only unpopular but unnatural. And Dodge does not stop at 

disapproval of this single practice: he precipitously and illogically attributes the French 

breakfast hour to a generalization about the “corruption of France,” the same rhetorical 

move of which Cooper complains throughout his own travel memoirs. Cooper’s satire of 

travel writing in Homeward Bound is full of examples highlighting the distinction 



 

50 

between the cosmopolitanism of the Effinghams, Paul Powis, and Cooper and the 

provincial and chauvinist opinions of Dodge and his ilk.
32

  

Just as French phrases remain untranslated in Cooper’s own travel writing, 

Dodge’s remarks are punctuated by the responses of Mlle. Viefville in untranslated 

French.
 33

 Cooper thus aligns the anti-touristic sentiments of the genteel portion of 

Dodge’s audience with the cosmopolitan reader who can understand the Parisian’s 

rebuttals—and the cosmopolitan traveler who would understand the French spoken in 

Paris itself and make less prejudiced observations. Indeed, the higher-class listeners mock 

Dodge’s misuse of French as well as his misguided opinions. His bad pronunciations, in 

particular, mark him as one whose go-aheadism has prevented him from taking the time 

to learn the language properly. Mlle. Viefville, for example, is baffled by Dodge’s 

“Nully” until Eve clarifies, “Pour Neuilly, mademoiselle” (I: 188). Shortly after, when 

Captain Truck apologizes to the ladies for Dodge’s inclusion of a “naughty place,” Dodge 

himself clarifies, “To Notter Dam, Captain Truck, if you please, and I flatter myself that 

is pretty good French” (I: 189). Of course it is actually terrible French, and this is one of 

                                                 
32

 If any more evidence of Cooper’s obvious alignment with the Effinghams were needed, 

it could be observed that, in both his confrontation with Dodge during this scene and his 

conversation with Eve afterwards, John Effingham voices many of the same views of 

American government found in The American Democrat, including the argument that if 

all men were equal, elections would be better held by lottery, and the declaration that the 

“[t]he character of the American government is to be sought in the characters of the state 

governments” (Homeward Bound I: 96, 99; see American Democrat 79, 25). 

33
 While a comparison of Cooper’s presentation of European languages with that of his 

more frequently studied Native American languages lies outside the scope of this project, 

Rosenwald makes just such a comparison in his reading of a similar scene of untranslated 

French in Last of the Mohicans. He contrasts Cooper’s idealistic and stereotypical 

portrayal of Native American languages with his more realistic depiction of French, 

concluding that the faults in Cooper’s portrayal of frontier multilingualism are evidence 

of his perspective on Native Americans, not his general views of language (30). 



 

51 

the greatest crimes in Dodge’s recitation as well as the most obvious marker of his 

worthless, provincial opinions.
34

 

While all of the Effinghams are cosmopolitan, the virtue is epitomized in the 

mysterious figure of Paul Blunt, whose “real” name is revealed to be Paul Powis later in 

the novel, but who we discover in the sequel actually to be Paul Effingham (son of John 

Effingham).
35

 When Mr. Sharp first invites Blunt to discuss the situation of the pursuing 

Foam as an American to an Englishman, Blunt counters, “I do not know that it is at all 

necessary I should be an American to give an opinion on such a point . . . . For what is 

right, is right, quite independent of nationality” (I: 62). Similarly, Blunt shows his 

balanced view of his own country when he observes, “I do not think you Americans, 

Miss Effingham, at the head of civilisation, certainly, as so many of your own people 

fancy; nor yet at the bottom, as so many of those of Mademoiselle Viefville and Mr. 

Sharp so piously believe” (II: 50). As the antithesis of Dodge, Blunt seeks a level of truth 

beyond provincial biases. He even refers to himself as a “cosmopolite” (II: 49, 52), and 

his eventual match with Eve seems most fitting because she, too, “properly belongs” to 

neither side of the Atlantic (I: 128). 

                                                 
34

 In Gleanings: France, Cooper describes another American with similarly terrible 

French, one who shares the poor pronunciation of “gullyteen” (Homeward I: 191; 

Gleanings: France 281). The real-life American, however, is an “eccentric, but really 

excellent-hearted and intelligent man” (Gleanings 280). This difference is perhaps an 

indication of Cooper’s greatly lowered opinions of his countrymen after his return to 

America, and/or the process by which real, complex people are simplified into satire. 

35
 Joel A. Johnson also notes that “Cooper’s ideal is embodied” in Blunt, but he frames 

this ideal in terms of Blunt’s compromise between the “self-confidence” of Captain 

Truck and the “deference” of Steadfast Dodge (139). 



 

52 

In addition to his balanced opinions of national differences, another marker of 

Blunt’s cosmopolitanism is his skill with languages. Describing her earlier acquaintance 

with Blunt in Germany, Eve recollects, “He made a good figure; was quite at his ease; 

speaks several languages almost as well as the natives of the different countries 

themselves” (I: 74). This facility with many languages keeps Blunt’s nationality a 

mystery. Eve further remarks of his uncertain origin, “this gentleman speaks three or four 

[languages] with almost equal readiness, and with no perceptible accent. I remember, at 

Vienna, many even believed him to be a German” (I: 75). Later, Mr. Sharp and Eve again 

debate Blunt’s nationality using the languages he speaks as evidence: 

“He is, then, an Englishman, after all!” said Mr. Sharp, in another 

aside. 

“Why not a German—or a Swiss—or even a Russian?”  

“His English is perfect; no continental could speak so fluently, with 

such a choice of words, so totally without an accent, without an effort. As 

Mademoiselle Viefville says, he does not speak well enough for a 

foreigner.” (I: 100) 

Blunt’s skill with European languages is so great that English is only identifiable as his 

native tongue for being less perfect. Whether his true nationality is discoverable or not, 

Blunt’s balanced and worldly opinions are clearly accompanied by an ability to converse 

like a native in almost any country of Europe. This connection is confirmed when Mlle. 

Viefville tells Blunt, “vous parlez trop bien Français not to love Paris,” and he responds, 

“I do love Paris, mademoiselle; and, what is more, I love Londres, or even la Nouvelle 

Yorck. As a cosmopolite, I claim this privilege, at least, though I can see defects in all” 

(II: 52). By seeing both good and bad, at home as abroad, Blunt epitomizes the 

intellectual benefits of the extended travel in Europe from which the Effinghams are just 

returning, and which the Coopers also experienced. 



 

53 

So far, all of these polite conversations in the Effinghams’ private rooms 

demonstrate how, in Homeward Bound, “the domestic novel becomes a sea novel” (H. 

Egan 78).
36

 One of the common criticisms of the novel, however, is that this “sea-going 

drawing room,” as Stephen Railton calls it (172), is improbably disturbed by an extended 

sequence of action in which the packet is demasted in a storm, left defenseless when most 

of the men go to procure a new mast, and then beset by Arabs.
37

 The first-class 

passengers escape in a launch and later reunite with the captain and crew. At this point, 

all of the able-bodied men, except the cowardly Dodge, attack the Arabs to retake the 

Montauk. After seeing the action from the perspective of the attackers, the reader is taken 

back in time to experience the battle with the women and older Effinghams hiding in the 

launch. In this second telling of the action sequence, Mlle. Viefville is the only one who 

can see what is going on. In response to the Effinghams’ eager questions, she gives a 

play-by-play of the battle presented only in untranslated French. The following passage is 

representative of the longer sequence: 

                                                 
36

 Establishing the importance of Homeward Bound in Cooper’s body of work, Hugh 

Egan goes on to argue that the novel “unites the two opposing strains of Cooper’s earlier 

fiction, and in so doing establishes a tendency that will recur throughout the second half 

of Cooper’s career: the sea will not be considered a romantic world by itself so much as a 

lens through which to view a troubled contemporary world, a lens capable of isolating 

and focusing essentially continental dilemmas. His sea fictions, in short, become novels 

of critical principle rather than of patriotism” (78). Thus travel, for Cooper, is no longer a 

source of romance; it becomes a tool for critiquing the problems at home. 

37
 Robert Emmet Long remarks that Homeward Bound “is unsatisfactory in many 

important respects” and claims that the “adventures experienced in the course of the 

voyage . . . seem gratuitous and pointless” (James 105). Railton, in contrast, argues, “Far 

from being irrelevant, the action of this novel is in fact an emotional scenario, a transcript 

of Cooper’s state of mind,” and “the fight with the Arabs for possession of the Montauk 

. . . is an imaginative transmutation of the struggle over a piece of land in Cooperstown” 

(174). 



 

54 

“Voulez-vous avoir la complaisance, monsieur?” said Mademoiselle 

Viefville, taking the glass from the unresisting hand of Mr. Effingham. 

“Ha! le combat commence en effet!”  

‘Is it the Arabs who now fire?” demanded Eve, unable, in spite of 

terror, to repress her interest.  

“Non, c’est cet admirable jeune homme, Monsieur Blunt, qui dévance 

tous les autres!”  

“And now, mademoiselle, that must surely be the barbarians?”  

“Du tout. Les sauvages fuient. C’est encore du bateau de Monsieur 

Blunt qu’on tire. Quel beau courage! son bateau est toujours des 

premiers!” (II: 137) 

For several pages, the lines in French almost outnumber those in English. As with Mlle. 

Viefville’s responses to Dodge’s travel journal, this choice of narration presumes a 

cosmopolitan reader. It is possible, of course, to pass over these impressions or to consult 

the earlier English narrative for clarification, but the exchange would be appreciated most 

by a bilingual reader. In such a climactic scene, Cooper does more than intersperse 

humorous French asides—he leaves exciting action that no reader would want to miss 

untranslated. 

In the next major action sequence, when the Montauk flees from the firing Arabs 

still on shore, it is not foreign language but technical jargon that might baffle the reader. 

As in The Pilot, much of the nautical language in Homeward Bound is either combined 

with metaphorical description or explained for lay readers, but some examples, like the 

following, are nearly impenetrable to those ignorant of sailing: 

By lowering the gaff the spanker was imperfectly bent; that is to say, it 

was bent on the upper leach. The boom was got in under cover of the 

hurricane-house, and of the bundle of the sail; the out-hauler was bent, the 

boom replaced, the sail being hoisted with a little and a hurried lacing to 

the luff. (II: 152) 

In his paper “Getting Under Way with James Fenimore Cooper,” Robert D. Madison 

decodes similarly technical passages. He notes that Cooper’s contemporary readers 



 

55 

would have been more knowledgeable of sailing than modern ones (having the equivalent 

of our general, but not particularly exact knowledge of airplanes), but the precise 

meaning of all of these technical terms would not have been obvious to everyone. It 

might seem unreasonable to expect a reader to be fluent in both nautical jargon and 

French, but the ideally cosmopolitan Blunt is an example of one gentleman who does 

know both, in addition to his impeccable English and numerous other European 

languages. Although he is only a passenger aboard the Montauk, Blunt’s nautical skill 

and expertise are essential for the escape and survival of his shipmates throughout their 

encounter with the Arabs. At the same time, Blunt’s ease with European languages makes 

him an appropriate companion for the refined Eve. For Cooper, there is benefit to 

knowledge of all kinds, and Blunt is an example of how even disparate knowledges can 

be combined in one supreme example of cosmopolitanism. 

After their series of close escapes, the international complement of passengers 

aboard the packet are drawn closer together, and the debate over the merits of England 

and America becomes less partisan. With a final show of his cosmopolitan impartiality, 

Blunt remarks how “it is the duty of the citizen to reform and improve the character of his 

country” (II: 172). He further explains Cooper’s own increasingly critical view of 

America by adding, “The American, of all others, it appears to me, should be the boldest 

in denouncing the common and national vices, since he is one of those who, by the 

institutions themselves, has the power to apply the remedy” (II: 172). Cooper 

demonstrates that the best American citizen is not blindly nationalistic, but instead is one 

who can solve the country’s worst problems through a cosmopolitan worldview and a 

willingness to criticize and improve. And just as Blunt has gained this impartiality from 



 

56 

his travels in Europe, John Effingham tells Mr. Sharp (actually Sir George Templemore) 

that the Englishman will gain a fairer perspective of America by extending his stay there. 

John Effingham predicts, “You have too much sense to travel through the country 

seeking for petty exceptions that may sustain your aristocratical prejudices, or opinions, if 

you like that better; but will be disposed to judge a nation, not according to preconceived 

notions, but according to visible facts” (II: 176). The virtues of the cosmopolitan society 

aboard the Montauk have also been observed by Thomas Philbrick. He writes:  

The ship, no longer the symbol of freedom from the responsibilities and 

restrictions of society, becomes a microcosm of that society. Into the 

Montauk is crowded “a congress of nations,” and the discipline of the ship 

serves as a lesson that might well be applied to governments on land. 

(James 123) 

 The international society of the packet is removed from the prejudices of the nationalist 

societies on land, and from that vantage point, the passengers prove capable of discussing 

social issues in a balanced way. Society’s many problems can only be resolved from the 

cosmopolitan perspective cultivated by international travel. 

Shortly after this genteel conversation, Cooper reprises the satire of Dodge’s 

travel journal, thereby demonstrating how the wrong kind of travel can serve instead to 

strengthen prejudices: 

Mr. Dodge . . . turned over to one of his most elaborate strictures on the 

state of society in France, with all the self-complacency of besotted 

ignorance and provincial superciliousness. Searching out a place to his 

mind, this profound observer of men and manners, who had studied a 

foreign people, whose language when spoken was gibberish to him, by 

travelling five days in a public coach, and living four weeks in taverns and 

eating-houses, besides visiting three theatres, in which he did not 

understand a single word that was uttered, proceeded to lay before his 

auditors the results of his observations. (II: 202) 



 

57 

With this description, Cooper summarizes the three qualities that distinguish Dodge’s 

travel from that of the Effinghams or of Cooper himself. First, Dodge is provincial 

because he is “complacent” in his lack of knowledge about the places he visits. Just as he 

holds to public opinion instead of proper logic and morality, he seeks to confirm his 

opinions abroad rather than expanding his viewpoint. Second, the hurry that, for Cooper, 

characterizes American society prevents Dodge from remaining in Paris long enough to 

gain a true sense of Parisian culture. The shortness of Dodge’s stay is exacerbated by his 

tendency to remain only in the public places most visited by travelers, preventing him 

from experiencing the true lives of the locals in what little time he does spend in the 

country. Perhaps most importantly, Dodge’s travel does not result in greater 

cosmopolitanism because he does not understand the language. In fact, Cooper notes the 

shortcoming twice in this brief passage. Dodge acts entirely counter to Cooper’s own 

philosophy of travel, in which learning the language is a priority.
38

 Cooper leaves so 

much French untranslated in his novel because he imagines a reader who, like himself, 

will be sufficiently worldly, and perhaps sufficiently well-traveled, to understand the 

language of Paris like a native. 

 

                                                 
38

 This philosophy is further demonstrated by Cooper’s decision to hire “foreign 

servants” while abroad so that they would “be a great aid in acquiring the different 

languages” (Gleanings: France 2). Many biographers and critics have also noted the 

importance of language learning in Cooper’s travel plans. Nathalia Wright lists having 

“his children learn French and Italian” as a reason for Cooper’s trip to Europe (115); 

Kennedy notes that “[t]he desire to afford his daughters German language instruction 

prompted their departure for Dresden in May 1830” (94); Wayne Franklin describes the 

instruction in French and Spanish given to the Cooper family in preparation for their time 

abroad, calling it “part of an educational plan for the family,” and further explaining that 

“the long work in French was also part of a long-matured wish of Cooper and his wife to 

spend some time abroad” (Early Years 513-14). 



 

58 

The elite cosmopolitanism of Cooper’s ideal of traveling may be somewhat 

extreme, but it also represents an older mode of travel: an extended stay in Europe during 

which one learns the language and moves in society. Cooper thus exemplifies the 

tradition epitomized by Benjamin Franklin’s residence in France and represented, in the 

nineteenth century, by scholars and cultural icons such as George Ticknor, Edward 

Everett, George Bancroft, and Washington Irving.
39

 Cooper is also a major contributor to 

the genre of the sea tale, and his inclusion of nautical language and maritime themes 

introduces the trope of seeing the world (and learning its many languages) from the 

forecastle, an attention to language that also can be seen in Dana’s Two Years before the 

Mast as well as in the works of Melville examined in Chapter Three.
40

 In both travel 

narrative and sea tale, Cooper emphasizes how the experience of travel can open the 

                                                 
39

 In his study of eighteenth-century travel literature, for example, Percy G. Adams 

describes a “long tradition of real and fictional traveled protagonists who learn of the 

diversity in the world, live happily or sadly abroad, acquire languages and impressions, 

and constantly make comparisons” (193). Dulles calls Franklin “the foremost American 

in Europe” and notes that he “completely bewitched Parisian society” (8). Dulles also 

describes how Ticknor spent “nearly four years in Europe, learning its languages, 

studying its cultures, absorbing everything” before taking the “specially created chair of 

modern languages” at Harvard (36). Rolena Adorno calls Irving “the first . . . to make use 

of Spanish as a tool of humanistic learning and research,” starting “a trend . . . to move 

beyond English-language perspectives on the Americas’ history” (52). Also, see Cushing 

Strout’s analysis of how “Europe was inevitably a training ground for literary, artistic, 

and scholarly development” (62), as well as Trease’s discussion of the literary Americans 

who undertook a Grand Tour in the first half of the nineteenth century (213-32). 

40
 Like Cooper’s sea tales, Dana’s Two Years is well known for introducing nautical 

language to lay readers. Blum even suggests, as I argue for Cooper’s novels, that Dana’s 

work “encourages the domestic reading community to assimilate technical nautical 

language and customs” (View 46). Dana’s book also demonstrates how the issues of 

linguistic cosmopolitanism developed in Cooper’s sea tales became staples of the genre. 

Throughout the narrative, Dana emphasizes the variety of nations encountered on a 

sailing voyage, the benefits of hearing such a mix of languages, and the pleasure of 

finding a common ground of understanding. He finds that learning the language of other 

peoples leads to a better understanding of their culture. 



 

59 

receptive mind of the cosmopolite to the experience of cultural difference. In contrast to 

the idealism that reduces this difference to universal commonality, Cooper emphasizes 

the remainder of cultural significance that eludes translation. For Cooper, the variety of 

human language can be both confusing and misleading, but leaving foreign and technical 

language untranslated gives the writer a broader choice for expressing a precise meaning. 

In contrast to the works of imperialism examined in the following chapter, and the 

touristic travel to Europe that characterizes the latter half of the century, Cooper’s travel 

involves learning different languages and terminology, balancing republican patriotism 

with a cosmopolitan respect for the value of national differences, at least when those 

differences are of European origin. How Cooper’s perspective on linguistic difference 

might change in reference to less “civilized” parts of the world is the subject of the next 

chapter.



 

60 

CHAPTER 2 

EXPANSIONISM AND EXCHANGE IN COOPER’S LATER WORKS 

After his return from Europe, and the various legal battles that followed it, James 

Fenimore Cooper expressed his growing frustration with the American rabble, 

particularly in contrast to the sophistication he had observed abroad. Whether aiming to 

critique America’s mercenary expansionist policies, or merely wishing to escape the 

country he now found so objectionable, Cooper more frequently set his later works 

outside of the familiar North American and transatlantic worlds of his earlier novels.
1
 

This shift in setting mirrors the United States’ increased interests beyond its own coasts, 

and it illuminates the shifting attitudes toward foreign language that accompanied such 

imperialist endeavors. 

Cooper’s cosmopolitan appreciation for European languages may have 

exemplified the views of early-nineteenth-century Americans in Europe, but the many 

Americans traveling to parts of the non-Western world expressed a very different attitude 

toward the foreign. In contrast to the esteem in which European culture was held, views 

of the “savage” peoples encountered in the course of American expansion tend toward 

two prejudicial extremes: the seemingly opposed, yet simultaneous beliefs that alien 

                                                 
1
 Whether, as Robert S. Levine argues, Cooper’s “disillusionment” with America caused 

him to search out foreign settings in order to “relinquish borders, disencumbering 

himself, as it were, of America itself” (102), or whether his growing criticism of the 

United States extended to a critique of its expansionism in the form of what George 

Dekker calls voyages “made in pursuit of plunder and discovery” (195), Cooper’s later 

works demonstrate a greater engagement with non-Western settings. Sandra M. 

Gustafson finds a similar change, albeit an earlier one, in her observation that Cooper’s 

“critique of empire” in The Bravo is “far more direct” than in The Prairie (125). Hugh 

Egan examines Cooper’s desire to escape “the shoreline,” arguing that Cooper’s 

increasing attention to the “mysteries of the open oceans” produces “a sense of 

Melvillean uncertainty and hidden fate” (78). 



 

61 

cultures are both utterly incomprehensible and easily translatable into Western terms.
2
 

This paradox can be found in views of non-Western languages as well as in attitudes 

toward cultural and economic exchange. Cooper’s later works of travel beyond America 

and Europe clearly map these two varieties of cultural misunderstanding. But while 

Cooper critiques both extremes, his treatment of “savage” cultures never equals the 

cosmopolitan appreciation of difference found in his European writings. 

Nevertheless, Cooper’s later sea tales raise questions of cross-cultural exchange 

that are central to the power structure of American imperialism. This chapter will 

examine how language, cultural concepts, and economic value are parallel currencies of 

exchange, and how the imperialist’s failure to recognize incommensurability—and thus 

to commence the difficult task of negotiating that difference through greater knowledge 

and understanding—results in the paradoxical extremes of too easy translatability and 

utter unknowability. The first section of this chapter outlines the common tropes of 

imperialist discourse highlighted in Cooper’s later works, examining the relationship 

between linguistic exchange and cross-cultural understanding. The second section 

demonstrates Cooper’s engagement with imperialist misunderstandings of linguistic 

difference in his novel Mercedes of Castile. The third section extends the analysis of 

language to the analogous translation of economic exchange, demonstrating that, while 

Cooper’s recognition of linguistic incommensurability takes an important step in the 

                                                 
2
 As discussed in the Introduction, David Spurr describes the two parts of this “paradox 

of colonial discourse” as “the desire to emphasize racial and cultural difference as a 

means of establishing superiority” and “the desire to efface difference and to gather the 

colonized into the fold of an all-embracing civilization” (32). 



 

62 

critique of American expansionism, his ultimate approval of America’s civilizing mission 

leaves his position both imperfect and ambivalent. 

Language and Cannibalism in Imperialist Discourse 

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the United States, though by no 

means a colonial power, was beginning to expand its military and commercial reach into 

the Pacific.
3
 The nature of this expansion is clearly illustrated by the United States 

Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, which Cooper draws on for at least two of his later 

novels (N. Philbrick 339). Its official instructions claim that “[t]he Expedition is not for 

conquest, but discovery,” but its mission to “extend the empire of commerce and science” 

was not accomplished without some violence (Wilkes xxvii-xxix).
4
 The expedition also 

epitomizes how blindness to cultural difference manifests in the expectation of easy and 

unproblematic word-for-word translation. A postscript to Wilkes’s instructions notes: 

The accompanying printed list of English words . . . are intended for 

Indian vocabularies, which can be filled up as circumstances permit, 

taking care that the same words be used in all of them. (Wilkes xxxi) 

                                                 
3
 As John M. Belohlavek has noted in his study of Jacksonian foreign policy, the United 

States, though “not seeking colonies,” “did not hesitate to carve out her own commercial 

empire” (151). Stressing American expansionist policies even further, Paul Lyons argues 

that “[a] whole U.S.-Pacific system of commerce and settlement functioned on a broad 

scale throughout [Oceania] from 1812 through the Civil War around the whaling industry 

(along with sandalwooders, sealers, bêche-de-mer traders), involving agents, 

communication networks, a consular system, and state-sponsored military protection, 

along with the missionaries who trained Island missionaries who fanned out, spreading 

trade and establishing U.S. influence throughout the Islands” (American 29). 

4
 One major goal was to further the interests of American commercial endeavors by 

charting the dangerous waters of the Pacific and establishing safe ports (Wilkes xxv-

xxvi). As Barry Alan Joyce demonstrates, however, protecting the interests of trade also 

depended upon the expedition’s “military purpose,” which was partly a response to the 

“perceived threats” of French and British warships in the Pacific, but also aimed “to send 

a message to the native inhabitants” (14). 



 

63 

In accordance with its scientific aims and methods, the expedition sought to expand the 

United States’ linguistic knowledge methodically, with the meticulousness and 

empiricism of any scientific enterprise. Accordingly, rather than learn each native 

language on its own terms, Wilkes’s instructions were to chart a rigid lexicon of 

equivalent vocabulary, to find a corresponding term in each of the new languages 

encountered for a series of predetermined English words. These instructions assume not 

only that all languages will have the same words, with no change in or overlapping of 

concepts, but also that their words will correspond perfectly to the shopping list of 

English words prepared in advance. Thus, the “accompanying printed list of English 

words” assumes that there is a universal dictionary of concepts to which the terminology 

of every human language must correspond. As radically different cultures are never quite 

this commensurable, either such a plan is doomed to failure, or, worse, by forcing such 

artificial and misguided correspondence onto a newly encountered language, imperialist 

discourse will erase cultural difference in the translation of the subaltern tongue.
5
 

At times, Cooper seems complicit with imperialism’s tendency to erase a 

“savage” language through the extremes of disavowal or assimilation: the accusation of 

animality or the assumption of too easy translation. An example of the first position 

occurs in the novel Afloat and Ashore (1844), a first-person narrative in which Miles 

Wallingford chronicles his extensive and exciting career sailing throughout the globe on 

various merchant voyages. Although Cooper’s hero travels to many strange lands, the 

language of the savage Other plays little role in the text. Yet one exception to this rule 

                                                 
5
 Eric Cheyfitz’s The Poetics of Imperialism studies how translation was used as a tool of 

cultural and linguistic domination throughout the history of colonialism and imperialism 

in the Americas. 



 

64 

warrants particular attention. While on a trading voyage in the Pacific, Wallingford 

describes a native language as “the uncouth sounds of the still more uncouth savages of 

that distant region” (180). These “uncouth savages” are like the Greeks’ idea of 

“barbarians,” so called because of their inability to speak properly (Spurr 102-103). The 

whites do not even take the time to ascertain the real names of these people, and instead 

call them things like “Smudge” and “Dipper.” This belittlement of their language 

accompanies other derogatory comments portraying the natives as little better than 

animals. For example, Wallingford calls Smudge “semi-human” and compares him to 

“baboons and monkeys” (182). It is obvious that the whites can barely understand these 

“savages,” but rather than admit their own failure to communicate, they imagine Smudge 

to be “almost without ideas” and to have “the air of downright insensibility” (182). 

Cooper, or his narrator, treats the speech of Smudge and his companions, unintelligible to 

the Americans, as hardly more advanced than animal grunts. Instead of admitting their 

inability to understand, the Americans recast the incommensurability of the alien 

language as inherent unintelligibility. 

Cooper begins to question these prejudices, however, when the seemingly 

“insensible” Smudge organizes the capture of the ship. Wallingford is forced to concede 

that “savages” have more sagacity than he previously thought, but he still uses language 

to outsmart them. He retakes control of the ship by speaking to the men below in a more 

complex style than Smudge, who possesses only a limited knowledge of English, can 

comprehend. In the end, it is difficult to determine what distance Cooper might have 

placed between the young Wallingford’s opinions and his own. Thomas Philbrick has 

pointed out that the “stoical dignity” of Smudge as he is hanged following the ship’s 



 

65 

recapture represents “the revolution that occurs in Miles’s judgment of the relative worth 

of the Indians and the whites” (James 140-42). Indeed, it is tempting to read the rebellion 

as a kind of forerunner to Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” Still, the apparent ease with which 

Wallingford outsmarts the entire band of natives seems to corroborate the whites’ 

linguistic and technological superiority. In either case, Cooper’s characterization of 

Smudge demonstrates how the radically foreign languages of non-white peoples are 

denigrated by the accusation of utter intelligibility, and the assumption that such 

incomprehensibility cannot be ranked with human speech.
 6

 

Cooper also engages with the seemingly impenetrable speech of the non-white 

Other in Homeward Bound, after the Montauk encounters hostile Arabs along the coast of 

Africa. As examined previously, the novel privileges foreign language when it is a 

marker of a cosmopolitan education in Europe. In contrast to its large sections of 

                                                 
6
 This trope is more famously employed by Poe in his depiction of the jabbering natives 

of Tsalal in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Like several of Cooper’s 

later works, including Afloat and Ashore, Poe’s novel responds to “the popular 

excitement which the preparations for the United States Exploring Expedition had 

stirred” (T. Philbrick, James 175). The racist stereotypes employed in Poe’s 

characterization of the Tsalalians as black and large-lipped are too obvious to deny. 

Critics seek instead to explain Poe’s purpose in including them. Mark Simpson, for 

example, argues that Poe invests in racism as “a viable discursive commodity” in order to 

“reinvest in authors the agency to shape the discriminations people make” (38). Focusing 

on language, Michael West argues that “[t]he strange speech of the Tsalalians sounds like 

aggressive baby talk” (312). Likewise, Scott Bradfield remarks, “The blacks in Too-Wit’s 

village possess no real language, only crazed ‘jabbering’” (79). The characterization of 

savages as language-less animals is also literalized in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 

where the brutal murder of two women turns out to have been committed by an 

orangutan. As John Carlos Rowe aptly puts it, “The razor-wielding, imitative, ferocious, 

and prodigiously strong orangutan of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ acts out a racist 

fantasy regarding civilized women—Mme and Mlle L’Espanaye—brutalized by 

‘savages’ incapable of ‘proper speech,’ lacking the linguistic competency of those 

‘Caucasians’ classified by Cuvier as the group that ‘has the most highly civilised 

nations’” (Literary 73). 



 

66 

untranslated French, the Arab language is never presented directly for the reader. 

However, it is clear that Cooper goes beyond the most unproblematically stereotypical 

portrayals of savage language. While he falls short of giving true voice to the Other, his 

treatment of non-verbal signs and of the threat of cannibalism encapsulates an archetypal 

scene of failed communication found in both the Columbus story and the contemporary 

record of American expansionism. Cooper’s portrayal of cross-cultural communication in 

Homeward Bound questions the imperialist use of translation for the erasure of cultural 

difference. 

The cosmopolitan assembly aboard the Montauk is defined by its combination of 

American, English, and European nationalities, but the passengers’ first encounter with 

radical difference occurs along the coast of Africa. After the ship is incapacitated by a 

storm, Captain Truck takes his men to procure a new mast from a wrecked Danish ship. 

That night, Captain Truck and his first mate Mr. Leach hear a noise on shore, sneak onto 

the beach, and capture the Arab man they find there. At first this stranger, like the natives 

in Afloat and Ashore, is described in animalistic terms. When knocked unconscious by 

the captain, he “[falls] like a slaughtered ox” (II: 14). Shortly afterward, Truck looks over 

the captive, “commenting on his points very much as he might have done had the captive 

been any other animal of the desert” (II: 15). The man is subsequently described has 

having “the whip-cord meagreness and rigidity of a racer” (II: 15). The Arab may be 

portrayed as something less than human in these offhand comments, but the ensuing 

scene undercuts any superiority the two Americans might feel. 

When the two mariners shine a light on their prisoner’s face, it is “sufficiently 

apparent that he fancied a very serious misfortune had befallen him” (II: 16). They 



 

67 

accordingly attempt to communicate that they mean him no physical harm. Cooper 

explains: “As any verbal communication was out of the question, some abortive attempts 

were essayed by the two mariners to make themselves understood by signs, which, like 

some men’s reasoning, produced results exactly contrary to what had been expected” (II: 

16). Partly because of the comical lowness of these characters, but also because of the 

inherent difficulty of communication between radically different cultures, the attempted 

reassurances make the Arab prisoner fearful of even greater danger. Seeing the unwanted 

results, the captain guesses that “the poor fellow fancies we mean to eat him” and begins 

a more focused effort to “let the miserable wretch understand, at least, that we are not 

cannibals” (II: 16). Despite these efforts, the prisoner’s increasingly alarmed expression 

makes it clear that he does expect of Truck and Leach what Westerners often consider the 

most savage and repulsive practice of an unknown culture—in short, he expects they will 

eat him. 

Whether or not the Arab was the first to take the mental leap to cannibalism, 

Truck and Leach do nothing but make the situation worse: 

Hereupon the mate commenced an expressive pantomime, which 

described, with sufficient clearness, the process of skinning, cutting up, 

cooking, and eating the carcass of the Arab, with the humane intention of 

throwing a negative over the whole proceeding, by a strong sign of dissent 

at the close; but there are no proper substitutes for the little monosyllables 

of “yes” and “no,” and the meaning of the interpreter got to be so 

confounded that the captain himself was mystified. (II: 16) 

Despite Leach’s best intentions, and the clarity he obviously seeks to achieve in 

establishing the noun of “cannibalism,” his non-verbal signs cannot match the more 

sophisticated grammar of speech and thus fail to communicate the most important 

element of the message: that the Americans do not intend to roast and eat their captive. 



 

68 

Truck can see Leach’s error, but when he attempts to pantomime the same message, the 

result is the same. Truck deals with his failure by “ascrib[ing it] to anybody but himself” 

and deciding that “this fellow is too stupid for a spy or a scout” (II: 17). In the end, they 

set the man free rather than suffer him to remain in fear of becoming their breakfast. 

This comedy of non-verbal communication raises an important issue for both the 

Western conceptualization of language and the ramifications of that theory for colonized 

peoples. The apparent primitiveness of gesture seems to support the idea that all human 

language might share some universal origin. And belief in the inherent unity of human 

language, whether its origin is divine or natural, might further support an ideal of 

universal understanding, like Anacharsis Cloots’s cosmopolitan plans to abolish national 

boundaries. In practice, however, the assumption of some primordial, universal language 

more often leads to the imposition of Western norms and religious concepts onto less 

powerful peoples, whose differences are not indications of a “primitive” state destined to 

progress into Western civilization, but markers of their own legitimate culture with a 

different set of norms entirely. 

Some gestures, undoubtedly, mimic biological realities sufficiently for their 

meaning to be understood by even the most widely divided cultures. For example, all 

humans must eat by putting food in their mouths, chewing, and swallowing, so a 

pantomime of this sort may convey particular and basic messages, although, as Cooper 

describes in Homeward Bound, even this simple a message may be greatly misconstrued.
7
 

                                                 
7
 In his analysis of the connections between speech and gesture, Adam Kendon describes 

several kinds of mimetic or illustrative gestures including “enactment . . . , the use of 

body parts as models of things . . . , and the use of moving hands as if they are sketching 

diagrams or shapes in the air,” as well as “point[ing] to things, persons, or locations as a 

way of bringing these in as referents” (112). 



 

69 

Similarly, some people may be able to mimic animal or other sounds in a way 

recognizable to anyone familiar with the original source. From such examples, many 

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century language theorists extrapolated that all human 

language was derived from natural and universal origins. However, for every one of these 

genuine universals (or at least global or species-wide truths), many more gestural or 

onomatopoeic signs seem universal when they are not so. Gestures that are 

conventionalized rather than illustrative vary greatly from culture to culture (Kendon 

118; Archer 80). For example, as sociologist Dane Archer points out, the “thumbs up” 

sign conveys “a very aggressive ‘screw you’ message” in Iran (80-81). Even seemingly 

mimetic gestures can prove less universal than a traveler might hope, as the American 

gesture of tipping a bottle to request a drink is quite close to the “an obscene gesture for 

‘homosexuality’ found in a slightly permuted form in many societies” (80). The same 

may be true of onomatopoeia. For example, the sound a rooster makes varies worldwide 

from “cock-a-doodle-doo” to “cocorico,” “kiao kiao,” and “kikeriki” (Bredin 558). 

 Sounds and gestures can be used to imitate reality, but more often, culturally 

specific signs and gestures are incorrectly taken for natural representations. Thus, to 

borrow Cooper’s example from Gleanings in Europe: Switzerland (91; see Chapter One), 

a traveler can imitate the sound of a rooster and possibly be understood, but to believe 

that it says “cock-a-doodle-doo” instead of “kikeriki” is the same kind of cultural 

misunderstanding that leads imperialists to mistake their own culturally specific concepts 

for universals. Thus, while recourse to gesture and sound may be the only option for 

communication in a foreign land, and may have some degree of success, these forms of 

communication can too easily foster the impression that all messages are equally 



 

70 

universal, and this assumption leads to misunderstanding, mistaken meaning, rather than 

the absence of understanding altogether. And it is misunderstanding that often proves to 

be the most dangerous and misleading failure of communication. 

In Homeward Bound, the first miscommunication with the captured Arab could be 

attributed to the ignorance of the two American mariners, but a second encounter with the 

Arabs suggests that non-verbal communication between radically different cultures is not 

as straightforward as universalist theories of human language would assume. When a 

larger party of Arabs appears on shore, Mr. Monday offers to go negotiate a peace with 

them, aided by a case of liquor. The cowardly Dodge accompanies him so as not to 

endanger anyone who would actually prove willing to fight should violence become 

necessary. The two ambassadors are received with hospitality, and all goes tolerably well 

until the Arab captured the night before reappears. Here, Cooper notes that the 

“inhabitants of the desert, in the course of ages, had gleaned certain accounts of mariners 

eating their shipmates, from their different captives, and vague traditions to that effect 

existed among them, which the tale of this man had revived” (II: 32-33).
8
 Although 

Cooper falls short of directly portraying the Arab language, this shift in perspective 

provides readers a more sympathetic view of the Montauk’s enemies than is common in 

imperialist discourse. Moreover, by revealing that the Arabs have the same kind of 

alarming rumors about the “savage” behavior of the whites as the whites do about 

                                                 
8
 Interestingly, Cooper further comments, “Had the sheik kept a journal, like Mr. Dodge, 

the result of these inquiries would probably have been some entries concerning the 

customs and characters of the Americans, that were quite as original as those of the editor 

of the Active Inquirer concerning the different nations he had visited” (II: 33). 



 

71 

“savages,” Cooper demonstrates how the failure to recognize and respect cultural 

difference can lead to ignorant assumptions of barbaric otherness. 

Cooper gives one final example of the failure of communication by signs, and of 

the disavowal of difference that attributes unthinkable acts to foreign peoples. The 

previously captured Arab undertakes a “pantomime . . . to explain the disposition of 

Captain Truck to make a barbecue of him” (II: 33). In this case, it is the Americans’ turn 

to misinterpret. Mr. Monday construes the communication as an invitation to dinner 

(which is exactly what the bon vivant would most desire). Even more tellingly, Dodge, 

“with a conformity of opinion that really said something in favour of the science of signs, 

. . . arrived at the same conclusion as the poor Arab himself—with the material 

difference, that he fancied that the Arabs were disposed to make a meal of himself” (II: 

33). Comically, yet perceptively, Cooper presents a bumbling array of characters, who, 

with an ironic “conformity of opinion,” all convert an incomprehensible message into the 

most extreme form of barbarity and inhuman Otherness—the threat of the great taboo of 

cannibalism. 

Although previous critics have disregarded these paired scenes of 

misinterpretation in Homeward Bound as comic interludes in an already superfluous 

adventure sequence, Cooper’s repeated and pointed commentary on non-verbal 

communication as well as on cannibalism directly references many narratives of 

exploration in which whites encounter radical and unthinkable cultural and linguistic 

difference.
9
 Indeed, Geoffrey Sanborn’s extensive research in The Sign of the Cannibal 

                                                 
9
 Stephen Arch, one of the few critics who mention these scenes at all, relegates them to 

the “comic end” of the “line or ornamentation in the plot that diverges from the known or 



 

72 

demonstrates that accusations of cannibalism are a perpetual and an almost defining 

feature of any encounter with a radically different culture. Richard Slotkin has noted, for 

example, that “[c]annibalism had traditionally been associated with the Indians of 

America since the discovery of the New World by the men of the Renaissance,” and 

stories of cannibalistic acts continued through the time of the Puritans (90). Ted 

Motohashi calls cannibalism “one of the most powerful terms in the written literature of 

conquest,” one that is “circulated as a normative representation of the transgressive 

Other” (85). This tradition of attributing cannibalism to unknown people extended to 

America’s trade and exploration in the Pacific. For example, when the Wilkes expedition 

surveyed its first group of Pacific Islands (The Tuamotu Group), the Americans were 

quick to assume the natives were cannibals. As Nathaniel Philbrick notes, “The natives in 

this region had a reputation for cannibalism, and [one member of the expedition] claimed 

that their gestures suggested that if the white men should come ashore ‘they would 

certainly be made a meal of’” (123). This is the same conclusion made by both the Arabs 

and the Americans in Cooper’s novel. In light of the repeated appearance of cannibalism 

in the history of colonialism and conquest, Cooper’s use of it in Homeward Bound proves 

to be more than incidental—it references an extensive history of imperialist encounters. 

Consequently, the association of an unknown culture with the equally 

incomprehensible act of cannibalism is far from random. Another form of disavowal, the 

accusation of this unspeakable crime is the equivalent of comparing the language of the 

                                                                                                                                                 

expected journey to place the passengers quite literally on the margins of the Arab 

world.”  



 

73 

Other to animal noise.
10

 As has been demonstrated previously, imperialist perceptions of 

“savage” language often resort simultaneously to two opposite extremes. On the one 

hand, native languages are presumed to reference universal concepts and hence to be 

readily translatable. On the other, what cannot be so readily understood in the “savage” 

language is characterized as inhuman. As Cooper will demonstrate at length in Mercedes 

of Castile, the same binary exists on the level of culture. On the one hand, the assumption 

that “savages” are in a “state of nature” assumes that cultural difference is only an earlier 

stage of a universal progression of human civilization. At the same time, colonialist 

discourse wards off the incommensurable differences inevitably found within such 

radically foreign cultures with an accusation of utter inhumanity, and this accusation 

frequently takes the form of one of the most profound human taboos, the act of 

cannibalism. 

Not only is the discourse of cannibalism a commonplace in the archive of 

colonialism dating back to the age of discovery, but even the term itself derives from an 

archetypal moment of imperialism, Columbus’s description of the New World. The word 

“cannibal” is traditionally associated with the Carib tribe, but it is unclear whether it 

comes from the Caribs’ own language or from the language of their enemies, the 

                                                 
10

 Mary K. Edwards makes this point in her discussion of “cannibal talk”: “The term 

‘cannibal’ has been applied to almost all groups of people at one time or another. Humans 

generally consider the eating of another human an anathema. Cannibalism, like incest or 

necrophilia, is the boundary beyond which we cannot stray and remain fully human. 

Those who do eat people are monstrous—animals, savages, witches, nonhumans. To 

label a group of people cannibals is a way to gain power over them and to control them. It 

has also served as the justification for often horrific acts of violence” (61). Likewise, 

Otter argues that, for many imperialists and explorers, “cannibalism is the ultimate sign 

of the unnatural and the uncivilized. Cannibal interruptions register the writer’s 

ambivalence toward ‘savage’ cultures” (Melville’s 14). 



 

74 

Arawaks, who are the source of Columbus’s belief that the Caribs were man eaters 

(Cheyfitz, Poetics 41-42). Hence, the term originates in linguistic uncertainty. Cheyfitz 

even questions whether Columbus’s “cannibals” actually ate human flesh, raising many 

of the same issues found in Cooper’s scene of cannibal pantomime: 

[Columbus] did not have any empirical evidence, and his assertion that the 

Arawaks themselves told him is contradicted by Columbus’s own 

admission that neither the Indians nor the Europeans knew the other’s 

language. If we try to imagine the use of gestures in this case, we have not 

gotten around the problem of translation, but only embedded ourselves 

more deeply in it. For gestures are already translations of the culturally 

specific signs that compose linguistic phenomena, although Columbus and 

the European voyagers who later followed him appear to have believed 

from moment to moment in the power of a universal gestural language to 

transcend the frontiers of translation that frustrated their efforts to 

communicate. (42) 

By pointing out that gestures can be just as culturally specific as language, Cheyfitz 

locates the same failures of communication Cooper describes in Homeward Bound at the 

moment of European conquest. Although presented comically, Cooper’s depiction of how 

seemingly universal and transparent signs can inadvertently signify horrible acts of 

cannibalism is not farfetched—instead, it echoes the very origin of the term. 

The similarities between Cooper’s scene of misunderstood cannibalism and the 

history of colonialism are made even more significant by the importance of Columbus, 

and of Spain more generally, during the later decades of Cooper’s career. Indeed, the 

figure of Columbus resonated with the United States’ own goals of expanding its 

influence and territories. In the 1820s, there was a surge of interest in Spain as Americans 

such as William H. Prescott and Washington Irving traveled there for study. Iván Jaksić 

argues that these Americans studied Spain in order to “contribute to the shaping of their 

own country’s national identity,” because “the story of the rise and fall of Spain 



 

75 

contained lessons of great relevance to the fledgling United States” (1-2).
11

 Pere Gifra-

Adroher argues that, by 1830, “the Columbian myth was totally engrafted in American 

letters” (54). Although the Spanish Conquest was most often seen as an example of an 

unnecessarily violent imperialism, the “heroic Columbus,” according to Eric Wertheimer, 

was often contrasted to the cruelty of later conquistadors; Columbus was admired for 

“discovering a New World reminiscent of the Protestant Eden or Arcadia” and meaning 

only “to bring Christianity to the benighted” (20).
12

  

The primary source of the Columbus legend for English-speaking Americans was 

Irving’s History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828).
13

 Further 

demonstrating the significance of the figure of Columbus, Rolena Adorno argues that 

“Washington Irving, as Prescott and others would do after him, turned the Spanish 

adventure in the New World into a remarkable Anglo-American story” and “created a 

nineteenth-century Columbus on the verge of discovery—and opportunity” (61). Thus, 

Columbus, and the Spanish conquest he began, were more than mere subjects of interest 

for nineteenth-century Americans, they encapsulated the spirit of discovery that was 

                                                 
11

 María DeGuzmán’s Spain’s Long Shadow also analyzes how “the construction of 

Anglo-American identity as ‘American’ has been dependent on figures of Spain (xii). 

12
 Spain’s alleged cruelty to the native civilizations it conquered generated the 

widespread “Black Legend,” whose “implicit denigration of the contemporary Spanish 

Americas,” according to Anna Brickhouse, “conveniently gave rhetorical support to a 

variety of US political positions toward Latin America” (75), and, as Richard L. Kagan 

argues, allowed “early nineteenth-century promoters of American exceptionalism . . . to 

see Spain as an example of what would happen to a country whose fundamental values 

were antithetical to those of the United States” (22). 

13
 Irving originally intended to translate the historical archive that had recently been 

compiled by Martín Fernández de Navarrete, but he instead decided to write a unified 

narrative history that combined information from the various Spanish documents. 



 

76 

beginning to drive American expansionism while warning of the dangers that such 

expansion might present. The signs of cannibalism in Homeward Bound may or may not 

be a direct reference to Columbus, but they clearly outline a defining feature of cross-

cultural contact—how the assumption of universality leads to vast misunderstanding. 

These issues will reappear, with far greater detail, in Cooper’s own version of the 

Columbus story. 

Discoveries of Incommensurability in Mercedes of Castile 

Cooper engages with the Spanish predecessor to American expansionism in his 

often-ignored novel Mercedes of Castile (1840). His retelling of Columbus’s first voyage 

highlights the colonialist assumptions about non-Western language that lead to radical 

misunderstanding. In the nineteenth century, Columbus was seen as a quintessentially 

American figure with the “self-reliance” necessary to ignore all who doubted the 

possibility of his plan and to push westward beyond the bounds of contemporary 

understanding. Furthermore, Columbus’s discovery of previously unknown continents 

and peoples, with the expansion of both territory and trade that it provided for Spain, 

epitomizes the ideal behind expansionist projects like the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 

which even sought to discover the “New World” of Antarctica. Cooper, indeed, makes 

the connection between Spain and America explicit when he notes in Mercedes of Castile 

that the date the Moors relinquished Granada to the Christian monarchs, November 25, 

was the same date the British “reluctantly yielded their last foothold on the coast of the 

republic” (I: 51). Despite the correspondence between Cooper’s version of the Columbus 



 

77 

story and American expansionism, Mercedes of Castile has been largely ignored and 

generally condemned when mentioned.
14

 

Most critics have found Cooper’s novel to be overly reliant on the historical 

record. However, Lawrence H. Klibbe, whose article appears in Spanish, offers one of the 

most positive, and consequently most interesting, readings of Cooper’s historical novel. 

The primary focuses of his study are Cooper’s representation of Spain and the many 

elements of Don Quixote in the book, but Klibbe also draws an important parallel 

between Spain’s Golden Age and Cooper’s America. He concludes: 

The mysterious forces of historical progress bring with them an inevitable 

battle between two civilizations, one primitive and one modern, and the 

violent disappearance of the one that is less advanced. Cooper confronts 

this moral contradiction within his country as well as in Mercedes: the 

victory of domination leads to a sense of responsibility and of decline. All 

of these influences and ideas call for a more just recognition of Mercedes 

of Castile. (1327, my translation) 

Thus, Klibbe recognizes that Mercedes of Castile is more than a history trying in vain to 

be a novel. Instead, Cooper uses the Columbus story to confront issues of imperialism 

                                                 
14

 For example, Dekker writes, “Nobody, I believe, has ever maintained that Mercedes is 

anything but a very bad book” (194). Wayne Franklin mentions in passing that “Cooper 

admittedly faltered in Mercedes of Castile” (“Brief Biography” 51). Many other critics 

take the tactic of Robert Emmet Long’s generally comprehensive overview of Cooper’s 

works and avoid discussing the novel entirely (James). In one of the very few articles 

about the novel, Donald M. Goodfellow admits, “For its many literary faults Mercedes of 

Castile has suffered well-deserved neglect” (318). Even when Goodfellow does conclude 

that the novel “is of considerable interest” to “the student of . . . the American historical 

novel,” the chief interest it would hold is still only its “unique . . . method” of combining 

source materials (328). Yet what Goodfellow sees as the novel’s principal area of 

interest, Robert D. Madison blames for its failure, focusing his essay on the “irrelevance” 

of the lengthy exposition on Spanish history and the saturation of the novel with 

historical details (“Cooper’s Columbus”). Stephen Harthorn joins Madison in this 

criticism, complaining, “The novel (a perfect example of oneupsmanship gone wrong in 

Cooper’s attempt to best Irving’s Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus) has been 

rightly criticized for its plodding pace and excessive dialogue, and especially for being 

‘source-bound,’ leaving little room for an appealing story to develop.” 



 

78 

that were anything but distant history for the United States in 1840. When read with an 

understanding of Cooper’s career-long engagement with language, as well as his 

increasing interest in questions of territorial and commercial expansion, this 

underappreciated novel reveals an exciting commentary on the misunderstanding 

produced by encounters with radical otherness. 

Although previous scholars have criticized the novel’s disproportionate 

organization, which devotes nearly half its length to events in Spain before Columbus 

even departs, each of the novel’s three phases illustrates an important aspect of the 

imperialist’s encounter with cultural difference. In the opening section, the focus on the 

strict social codes and mores of Spain demonstrates the relatively unproblematic 

interpretations that occur within a single cultural context. In a society where cultural 

norms are taken for universals, and all dissenters, such as the Moors or the Jews, are 

expelled, most messages among members of that monolithic culture can be conveyed 

with little to no misunderstanding. The ease with which Spanish society interprets actions 

through the lens of its own culturally specific relations puts the misunderstandings and 

uncertainties of the later parts of the novel into greater contrast.  

Moreover, while many commentators have criticized the novel’s clumsy 

combination of historical fact and romantic plot, there is an important thematic 

connection between the fictional story, featured primarily in the last third of the novel, 

and the historical account of Columbus’s voyage that occupies the middle section.
15

 

Throughout both the transatlantic voyage and the initial exploration of the Caribbean, 

                                                 
15

 Dekker, for example, calls the novel “a narrative of Columbus’s first voyage to the 

New World on to which Cooper has soldered an absurd and puerile love story” (194). 



 

79 

Columbus and his crew engage in repeated misinterpretations, first by misreading signs 

of land and then by incorrectly translating the gestures and speech of the Caribbean 

natives. In both cases, the Spaniards see what they want to see. Columbus believes he can 

translate the communication of the natives because he takes his own cultural assumptions 

for universals, viewing as a prelapsarian state of innocence what is really a distinctly 

different culture. Columbus not only fails to communicate (an absence of understanding) 

but also more actively misunderstands the natives. His universalizing assumptions lead 

him to believe that communication has taken place when it has not. 

Columbus’s historical misunderstanding of the New World and the people he 

found there is mirrored in the novel’s romantic plot, in which Cooper’s hero Luis 

becomes infatuated with the beautiful indigenous “princess” Ozema. Luis eventually 

discovers that, like all the people encountered by Columbus, Ozema already possesses a 

culture of her own, and the incompatibility of her culture and Spanish culture leads to 

chronic misunderstanding. Throughout the novel, Cooper’s parallel examinations of both 

linguistic and cultural misunderstanding demonstrate the same willful ignorance seen in 

the U.S. Exploring Expedition’s shopping list of vocabulary. The assumption of too easy 

translatability results in the effacement of native culture. 

 

The first section of Cooper’s novel, which draws heavily on Prescott’s history of 

the Spanish monarchs (Goodfellow 319-24), depicts a series of nuanced negotiations in 

Spain. These include the courtship of Ferdinand and Isabella, discussions about whether 

the romantic hero and known rover Luis de Bobadilla is worthy of the hand of Mercedes 

de Valverde, and bargaining for terms for the voyage that would recognize the audacity 



 

80 

of Columbus’s undertaking while preserving the dignity of the monarchs. Each decision 

and each formal treaty is balanced between competing considerations of social standing, 

duty, and honor. For example, Isabella discusses her upcoming marriage with full 

knowledge of this complex web of responsibilities: 

“We are not to think principally of ourselves in entering upon this 

engagement,” continued Isabella, earnestly—“for that would be 

supplanting the duties of princes by the feelings of the lover. . . . If I may 

have seemed to thee exacting in some particulars, . . . it is because the 

duties of a sovereign may not be overlooked. Thou knowest, moreover, 

Fernando, the influence that the husband is wont to acquire over the wife, 

and wilt feel the necessity of my protecting my Castilians, in the fullest 

manner, against my own weaknesses.” (I: 46-47) 

The future queen will not agree to marry Ferdinand without considering the culturally 

specific relationships both of ruler to subject and of husband to wife. Likewise, when the 

novel jumps forward to the events of 1492, Luis is judged unworthy of marrying 

Mercedes because his previous actions are deemed unseemly for the husband of a noble 

lady of Isabella’s court. In another passage rife with various social obligations, Mercedes 

recounts her promise not to marry without Isabella’s consent: 

“She spoke to me, Luis, of our duties as Christians, of our duties as 

females, and, most of all, of the solemn obligations that we contract in 

wedlock, and of the many pains that, at best, attend that honoured 

condition. When she had melted me to tears, by an affection that equalled 

a mother’s love, she made me promise—and I confirmed it with a 

respectful vow—that I would never appear at the altar, while she lived, 

without her being present to approve of my nuptials; or, if prevented by 

disease or duty, at least not without a consent given under her royal 

signature.” (I: 84) 

Playing the roles of both mother and monarch, Isabella reminds Mercedes of the 

responsibilities of Christian, woman, wife, and daughter. And these passages are just two 

of the many possible examples illustrating the web of social relations that any Spanish 

citizen must interpret and apply to major decisions as well as to daily actions. Such 



 

81 

examples create a “control” case of unproblematic communication within a monolingual 

culture against which the interpretive problems of the later sections of the novel will 

show in sharper contrast. 

In the middle section of the novel, Cooper’s narration stays very close to the 

historical record of Columbus’s voyage and landing, including the Spaniards’ 

innumerable assumptions and misinterpretations. Through this account, Cooper 

highlights the importance of proper interpretation while examining the causes of 

interpretive error. In recent years, many analyses of the Columbus story have pointed out 

how little the Spaniards must have understood of the native peoples they encountered.
16

 

Tzvetan Todorov’s analysis of the journal reconstructed by Las Casas contains a 

particularly insightful reading of Columbus’s repeated misinterpretations. As Todorov 

notes, it is not surprising that Columbus could not understand the Caribbean natives, but 

it is strange that he so often insists communication has taken place (31). Todorov 

suggests that “Columbus performs a ‘finalist’ strategy of interpretation, in the same 

manner in which the Church Fathers interpreted the Bible: the ultimate meaning is given 

                                                 
16

 Gesa Mackenthun, for example, notes numerous inconsistencies in the various extant 

documents related to when, how, and whether the Spaniards understood the native 

peoples they conquered and argues, “someone who does not understand a word of what is 

spoken and who is unfamiliar with the body language of a foreign culture may easily 

assign wrong interpretations to the signs he encounters” (Metaphors 74-76). Cheyfitz 

further asserts, “Columbus’s European paradigm of what a language was, and hence of 

what a human was, must have been challenged. But rather than consciously questioning 

his culture’s centrality, a question that would have threatened terrific anxiety by raising 

doubts about his grasp of the situation, he represses the question by projecting it onto the 

Indians; the result is Columbus’s hallucinatory attempts to domesticate the far-fetched in 

his recurring fantasy that he understands the Indians’ language” (Poetics 110). This last 

argument will prove particularly relevant to my reading of Cooper’s novel, as it is such 

an unwillingness to rethink his own “culture’s centrality” that causes Luis to 

inadvertently mislead Ozema. 



 

82 

from the start . . . ; what is sought is the path linking the initial meaning (the apparent 

signification of the words of the biblical text) with this ultimate meaning” (17). In other 

words, Columbus is so confident in what he expects to find that he twists all signs to 

point back to this expectation. As a consequence, as Todorov aptly summarizes, “At sea, 

all the signs indicate land’s proximity, since that is Columbus’s desire. On land, all the 

signs reveal the presence of gold: here, too, his conviction is determined far in advance” 

(20). Columbus’s misinterpretations are not simply failures to understand; they indicate 

the far more pernicious practice of imposing one’s expected meaning onto alien sign 

systems.  

Todorov links Columbus’s misinterpretation of the natives’ language to his 

misinterpretation of other signs throughout the voyage, and both kinds of misreading 

appear in Cooper’s retelling, where the short-sighted assumptions underlying such 

misinterpretations are brought to the fore. Although neither Todorov’s analysis, nor the 

original Spanish documents, would have been available to Cooper, the same record of 

misinterpretation observed by Todorov is quite clear in Cooper’s main source, 

Washington Irving’s history of the voyage. For example, Irving writes, “It is evident that 

a great part of this fancied intelligence was the mere construction of the hopes and wishes 

of Columbus; for he was under a spell of the imagination, which gave its own shapes and 

colours to every object” (248).
17

 In Cooper’s novel, as well as in the Columbus journal 

                                                 
17

 Irving goes on to describe Columbus’s persistent belief that he was in Asia, and his 

tendency to interpret all communication as pointing to that foregone conclusion. 

Likewise, Irving notes, “Columbus looked in vain for bracelets and anklets of gold, or for 

any other precious articles: they had been either fictions of his Indian guides, or his own 

misinterpretations” (253-54). Later, he muses, “It is curious to observe how ingeniously 

the imagination of Columbus deceived him at every step, and how he wove every thing 

into a uniform web of false conclusions” (279). With particular attention to the 



 

83 

and in Irving’s history, the mariners are preoccupied with a series of omens, portents, and 

signs as they cross the uncharted ocean: an erupting volcano (I: 230-31), a meteor (II: 18-

19), and innumerable signs of land.
18

 In Cooper’s version, the most superstitious 

interpretations are attributed to the common sailors, while the heroic Columbus provides 

more rational, if anachronistically scientific, explanations. Despite Cooper’s 

characteristic distinction between common men and the natural aristocrat, these historical 

misreadings highlight the act of interpretation as a key theme of the novel and 

foreshadow the Spaniards’ equally mistaken interpretation of Caribbean language and 

culture. 

Accordingly, in Cooper’s novel as in the historical voyage, the repeated 

misinterpretation of signs of land mirrors the misinterpretation of the gestures and 

language of the natives once the Spaniards reach the New World. Cooper does not 

describe Columbus’s passage among the Caribbean islands in as much detail as he 

describes the voyage, but he does cast some doubt on the amount the Spaniards could 

have understood. He describes, for example, how “Columbus proceeded to other islands, 

                                                                                                                                                 

difficulties of communication with the natives, Irving reports, “The misapprehension of 

these, and other words, was a source of perpetual error to Columbus” (290). He 

concludes, “[T]he vague accounts collected through the medium of signs and imperfect 

interpretations, filled the mind of Columbus with magnificent ideas of the wealth which 

must exist in the interior of this island” (347). 

18
 Cooper reports that a large “field of sea-weed” is interpreted as “a sign of the vicinity 

of land” in mid-September, even though Columbus will not reach San Salvador until 

October 12 (II: 20). Several days later, still in the middle of the Atlantic, the Spaniards 

find a crab that they believe is “never known to go farther than some eighty leagues from 

the land” and “one of the white tropic birds, which, it is said, never sleep on the water” 

(II: 30). Cooper further highlights the madness of these hopes when he describes how, 

after seeing these supposed signs of land, the crew taste the ocean’s water and, “so 

general was the infatuation, that every man declared the sea far less salt than usual” (II: 

30). 



 

84 

led on by curiosity, and guided by real or fancied reports of the natives” (II: 88). He later 

states the fallibility of Columbus’s interpretations more forcibly when noting that the 

“adventurers” were “following directions that were ill comprehended, but which, it was 

fancied, pointed to mines of gold” (II: 89). Finally, and most strongly indicating 

Columbus’s pervasive misinterpretation, Cooper summarizes, “The delusion of being in 

the Indies was general, and every intimation that fell from those untutored beings, 

whether by word or sign, was supposed to have some reference to the riches of the east” 

(II: 89). Even after the strongly negative choice of the word “delusion,” Cooper does not 

quite proclaim, as Irving does, that the Spaniards were flat wrong in their interpretations. 

On one hand, such a denunciation would work against Cooper’s overwhelmingly positive 

and heroic portrayal of Columbus.
 19

 On the other hand, by understating Columbus’s 

misinterpretations of the natives, Cooper invites the reader to make the same 

assumptions, heightening the effect when the plot finally reveals their fallibility. 

In other seemingly apologetic moments, it is possible that Cooper is merely 

extending his cosmopolitan understanding of cultural difference to the Spaniards’ own 

assumptions. For example, he summarizes Columbus’s activities: 

All this time, there had been as much communication as circumstances 

would allow, with the aborigines, the Spaniards making friends wherever 

they went, as a consequence of the humane and prudent measures of the 

admiral. It is true that violence had been done, in a few instances, by 

seizing half a dozen individuals in order to carry them to Spain, as 

offerings to Doña Isabella; but this act was easily reconcilable to usage in 

that age, equally on account of the deference that was paid to the kingly 

authority, and on the ground that the seizures were for the good of the 

captives’ souls. (II: 92)  

                                                 
19

 Indeed, Robert Foulke mentions Mercedes as an example of how “flattering portraits of 

Columbus became a sign of patriotism” (76). 



 

85 

While Cooper casts some doubt on the justice of the Spaniards’ actions with his odd 

conjunction of violent “seizures” and the claim that the Spaniards were “making friends 

wherever they went,” he invites his readers to understand the goodness of Columbus in 

the context of the admiral’s historical limitations, to see his actions as “easily 

reconcilable to the usage in that age.” The ability to put Columbus’s actions in the 

context of his own cultural norms is a virtue of the cosmopolitan reader Cooper imagines 

for many of his works. While this empathy for the man who initiated centuries of colonial 

atrocities might seem to ally Cooper with the United States’ own imperialist policies, 

Cooper’s romantic plot contains an extensive play with the interpretation of native 

language that works against such a narrow condemnation. As the following reading will 

demonstrate, the novel’s conclusion suggests that Cooper recognizes and even values 

cultural and linguistic difference in a way that surpasses the prejudices of his 

contemporaries. 

 In the final section of the novel, which breaks away from the historical record to 

further the romantic plot, Cooper most fully explores the failures of communication 

between the Europeans and the native peoples they encountered. After the preliminary 

descriptions of the Spaniards’ activities in the Caribbean, Luis and his Cervantean 

sidekick Sancho Mundo travel to stay with a local cacique, Mattinao, and his tribe. At 

first, cultural symbols seem easily comprehensible: 

Mattinao drew from under a light cotton robe, that he occasionally wore, a 

thin circlet of pure gold, which he placed upon his head, in the manner of 

a coronet. This Luis knew was a token that he was a cacique, one of those 

who were tributary to Guacanagari, and he arose to salute him at this 

evidence of his rank, an act that was imitated by all of the Haytians also. 

From this assumption of state, Luis rightly imagined that Mattinao had 



 

86 

now entered within the limits of a territory that acknowledged his will. (II: 

96)
20

 

Amazingly, Luis can understand the symbols of rank among the Haytians as easily as in 

any court of Europe. The symbol of leadership is a crown, and the proper sign of respect, 

as at home, is to rise in salute (although one might wonder whether the Haytians stand 

because it is their usual practice or only in imitation of Luis). Furthermore, the narration 

does not leave the reader to guess at the accuracy of Luis’s suppositions, but declares 

outright that Luis “rightly imagined.” Like Cooper’s sympathetic portrayal of 

Columbus’s errors, this statement firmly places the reader in a position to make cultural 

assumptions, dramatizing the failure to recognize cultural difference and heightening the 

effect of the reversal that will follow. 

Almost immediately following these observations, Cooper begins to undercut 

such interpretive confidence as Luis makes another, less accurate assumption: 

[Mattinao] attempted to converse with his guest in the best manner their 

imperfect means of communication would allow. He often pronounced the 

word, Ozema, and Luis inferred from the manner in which he used it, that 

it was the name of a favourite wife, it having been already ascertained by 

the Spaniards, or at least it was thought to be ascertained, that the caciques 

indulged in polygamy, while they rigidly restricted their subjects to one 

wife. (II: 96) 

In contrast to the previous example, Cooper modifies the confident phrase “already 

ascertained” with the less sure “thought to be ascertained.” Indeed, Luis’s inference about 

Ozema proves incorrect, as she is actually Mattinao’s sister. The misunderstanding 

appears to have arisen, at least in part, from a cultural difference between the rulers of 

Spain and of Hayti. As Cooper explains, “According to the laws of Hayti, the authority of 

                                                 
20

 Cooper refers to this people and their country as Haytians and Hayti, and I will use his 

terminology and spelling in the following analysis. 



 

87 

a cacique was transmitted through females, and a son of Ozema was looked forward to, 

as the heir of his uncle” (II: 99-100). Luis is correct in assuming from Mattinao’s tone 

that Ozema will be the mother of his heir, but an incongruity of cultural concepts makes 

his interpretation unreliable. The Haytian concept for such a woman is not congruent with 

the Spanish one, so neither “wife” nor “sister,” nor any Spanish or English word, fully 

conveys the precise position Ozema occupies in her own society. Luis misinterprets 

Ozema’s position because the concept for her status fails to translate directly into 

European language. 

Todorov quotes a passage from the Columbus journals that mirrors this kind of 

misunderstanding. In it, Columbus wonders if “cacique” signifies “king or governor,” and 

whether another term means “hidalgo or governor or judge.” Todorov offers the 

following analysis: 

having learned the Indian word cacique, [Columbus] is less concerned to 

know what it signifies in the Indians’ conventional and relative hierarchy 

than to see to just which Spanish word it corresponds, as if it followed of 

itself that the Indians establish the same distinctions as the Spaniards, as if 

the Spanish usage were not one convention among others, but rather the 

natural state of things. (29) 

By assuming that “wife” or “sister,” like “governor” or “judge,” are universal categories 

rather than culturally specific and constructed terms (like the complex social-tie system 

found in Spain), both Luis and Columbus ignore the possibility that the Haytians have 

their own radically different culture. They instead expect a one-to-one correspondence of 

vocabulary, just like the predetermined list of vocabulary sought by the Wilkes 

expedition. This error is a methodological error of translation. Like the important 

difference between ville and township Cooper emphasizes in Gleanings in Europe, a 

difference lost when the terms are translated (see Chapter One), the Spaniards’ blindness 



 

88 

to the fact that culturally specific categories may not align perfectly across different 

languages leads to a more profound misunderstanding than simply not knowing the 

Haytians’ word for “wife.” 

Luis, who is bred to value the meticulous refinement of the Spanish court, invites 

such profound misunderstanding again and again as he proves unable to accept the 

radical difference of Hayti and instead seeks equivalents for the cultural norms of Spain. 

Admiring the scenery as he is rowed off to the village, he incongruously combines the 

natural beauty of the island with the courtly polish of his Spanish love: 

Luis saw fifty sites where he thought he could be content to pass his life, 

provided, always, that it might possess the advantage of Mercedes’s 

presence. It is scarcely necessary to add, too, that in all these scenes he 

fancied his mistress attired in the velvets and laces that were then so much 

used by high-born dames, and that he saw her natural grace, embellished 

by the courtly ease and polished accessaries [sic] of one who lived daily, if 

not hourly, in the presence of her royal mistress. (II: 96) 

In addition to reminding the reader of the romantic plot, largely abandoned since the 

departure from Spain, Luis’s daydream of his future life with Mercedes serves to contrast 

her fussy attire and “polished accessories” with the natural grace he will soon find in 

Ozema, foreshadowing the difficulties Luis will have reconciling his previous admiration 

of “high-born dames” to the seemingly less artificial beauty he finds in the New World. 

Making the comparison even more explicit, Luis finds an uncanny resemblance between 

Ozema and his Spanish fiancée, Mercedes: 

Luis bowed to this Indian beauty, as profoundly as he could have made his 

reverence to a high-born damsel of Spain; then, recovering himself, he 

fastened one long steady look of admiration on the face of the curious but 

half-frightened young creature who stood before him, and exclaimed, in 

such tones as only indicate rapture, admiration, and astonishment 

mingled—  

“Mercedes!”  



 

89 

The young cacique repeated this name in the best manner he could, 

evidently mistaking it for a Spanish term to express admiration, or 

satisfaction; while the trembling young thing, who was the subject of all 

this wonder, shrunk back a step, blushed, laughed, and muttered in her soft 

low musical voice, “Mercedes,” as the innocent take up and renew any 

source of their harmless pleasures. (II: 99) 

Presuming, even before he sees her, that a noble woman in Haiti will be somehow 

equivalent to one in Spain, Luis first addresses Ozema with a deep bow. When he looks 

up, he is shocked to find that the “half-frightened young creature” (a description 

antithetical to the courtly demeanor of Mercedes) looks to him just like his Spanish lady. 

In his surprise, Luis utters Mercedes’s name, which, like “Ozema” in the previous scene, 

is misunderstood. The cacique and his sister believe the exclamation to be a general term 

of great approval, a misconception that Ozema retains throughout the novel. 

If the doubling of Mercedes and Ozema represents Luis’s conflation of Spanish 

culture with universality, it remains unclear how identical these bizarre doppelgangers 

really are. At times it seems that any resemblance is only the wishful thinking of the 

lovesick Luis, like seeing signs of gold and land when gold and land are the things most 

desired. The two women’s similarities are first called “a decided and accidental 

resemblance,” but this is amended by the admission that, “[c]ould the two have been 

placed together, it would have been easy to detect marked points of difference between 

them” (II: 101). Indeed, when Ozema does live for a time in the apartments of Mercedes, 

it seems that no one notices the resemblance. From Luis’s perspective, the clearest 

distinction between the two is the divide between civilization and savagery, or to put it 

more in Ozema’s favor, between artificial refinement and natural charms. The initial 

descriptions of the “Indian beauty” as a “curious but half-frightened young creature” and 

a blushing and laughing “trembling young thing” make it easy to “fancy Eve such a 



 

90 

creature, when she first appeared to Adam, fresh from the hands of her divine creator, 

modest, artless, timid, and perfect” (II: 100). Instead of correctly seeing that Ozema is 

part of a radically different culture, Luis imagines she lives in a state of nature, and 

imposes a Christian concept of prelapsarian innocence onto her as if it were a universal 

fact. And instead of understanding how concepts like “wife” or “sister” might differ for 

her people, Luis mistakes his own versions of such concepts for universals. To see 

Ozema and Mercedes as nearly identical, differing only in that one is cultured while the 

other is innocent and childlike, is to replicate Columbus’s own misunderstanding of the 

people he has discovered as lacking all language and culture.
21

 Cooper’s commentary on 

such a mistake becomes more evident as the romantic plot unfolds. 

As Luis begins to converse with Ozema, the possibilities for misunderstanding 

multiply, even as the prospects for meaningful communication ostensibly increase: 

To Ozema, then, Luis put most of his questions; and ere the day had 

passed, this quick-witted and attentive girl had made greater progress in 

opening an intelligible understanding between the adventurers and her 

countrymen, than had been accomplished by the communications of the 

two previous months. She caught the Spanish words with a readiness that 

seemed instinctive, pronouncing them with an accent that only rendered 

them prettier and softer to the ear. (II: 104) 

                                                 
21

 Irving describes how Columbus “imagined that the Indians had no system of religion, 

but a disposition to receive its impressions” (291-92). An ambiguous comment in the 

reconstructed journal that Columbus took several Indians back to Spain so they could 

“learn to talk” provides more fodder for critical commentary (Cheyfitz, Poetics 109). 

Todorov argues, “Columbus’s failure to recognize the diversity of languages permits him, 

when he confronts a foreign tongue, only two possible, and complementary, forms of 

behavior: to acknowledge it as a language but to refuse to believe it is different; or to 

acknowledge its difference but to refuse to admit it is a language” (30). Cheyfitz does not 

take the mysterious statement quite as literally, and argues, “Perhaps what is troubling 

Columbus throughout his journal is not the question of whether the Indians possess a 

language, but the question of whether he possesses one, that is, the question of what a 

language is” (Poetics 110). 



 

91 

Despite some of Cooper’s earlier descriptions, he now makes it clear how unsuccessful 

the Spaniards’ attempts to communicate with the natives have been. This failure 

undercuts Luis’s optimistic expectations about how much information he and the lovely 

Ozema have been able to exchange without error or misunderstanding. Luis even 

imagines that Ozema can instinctively learn Spanish as if it were a natural rather than a 

culturally relative language. Luis reflects: 

The admiral had also enjoined on him the importance of ascertaining, if 

possible, the position of the mines, and he had actually succeeded in 

making Ozema comprehend his questions on a subject that was all-

engrossing with most of the Spaniards. Her answers were less intelligible, 

but Luis thought they never could be sufficiently full; flattering himself, 

the whole time, that he was only labouring to comply with the wishes of 

Columbus. (II: 105) 

If her answers are “less intelligible,” it is unclear how Luis can be sure that he has 

“actually succeeded” in making Ozema understand his questions. Moreover, Cooper goes 

on to strongly hint that the infatuated Luis is deceiving himself about his motives for 

spending so much time with the beautiful Haytian, making it equally possible that he is 

deceiving himself about how much he has communicated with her at all. 

In one of the last scenes before the ships leave for Europe with Ozema aboard, 

Luis gratifies his desire to play the lover when he protects Ozema from the attack of 

“Caonabo,” an evil Carib chief. As the Haytian princess practically falls into his arms 

with fear, Luis “[hears] her murmuring— ‘Caonabo—no—no—no!’” and “[understands] 

this exclamation to express her strong disinclination to become a wife of the Carib chief” 

(II: 111). However accurate this implicit “understanding” might be, Luis, as surely as 

Columbus finding signs of land and gold wherever he looks, turns the situation into that 

for which he might most hope. Like a knight errant of old, the young soldier protects a 



 

92 

beautiful lady in distress, who from apparent affection for her protector does not wish to 

marry another. Ironically, Ozema’s exclamations, like all of the ensuing communication 

between Luis, Ozema, and Caonabo, are the same kind of noun-only exchanges that 

cause so much trouble in Homeward Bound. And if “Caonabo,” a chief of the tribe that 

supposedly lent its name to man-eating, sounds like an infantile pronunciation of 

“cannibal,” it serves only to make Cooper’s clues of misunderstanding and 

misinterpretation even stronger. 

In the confined spaces of the ship on the long voyage back to Spain, Luis and 

Ozema appear to reach new levels of understanding. Ozema’s “progress in Spanish” is 

“such as to astonish even her teacher,” and Luis has “acquired nearly as many words of 

her native tongue, as he [has] taught her of his own” (II: 141). Even so, the following 

scene will demonstrate that this exchange of words is not enough to ensure mutual 

understanding. As a fearful storm threatens the lives of all aboard the ships, Cooper 

introduces a pivotal dialogue explaining, “they conversed, resorting to both dialects for 

terms, as necessity dictated. We shall give a free translation of what was said, 

endeavoring, at the same time, to render the dialogue characteristic and graphic” (II: 

141). Even though Cooper claims that both characters speak in a combination of their 

native and a foreign language, when “translated” for his English readers, Ozema’s speech 

is infantile and broken while Luis’s is elevated, just as he would speak in pure Spanish. It 

is likely this choice reveals Cooper’s own failure to recognize that Ozema’s seemingly 

primitive state may really be only a different kind of equally developed civilization, but it 

also invites the reader to participate in Luis’s assumption that the only difficulty lies in 



 

93 

understanding the broken speech of Ozema, while his communication must be perfectly 

clear.  

This assumption helps conceal a gross communication error that, although not 

explained at the time, will return to put Luis’s marriage to Mercedes in jeopardy. Fearing 

that the lovely girl might die in her “benighted” state, Luis gives her the jeweled cross 

that Mercedes had given him before he left Spain: 

The young man wore the parting gift of Mercedes near his heart, and 

raising a hand he withdrew the small jewel, pressed it to his own lips with 

pious fervour, and then offered it to the Indian girl.  

“See”—he said—“this is a cross; we Spaniards revere and bless it. It is 

our pledge of happiness.”  

“That Luis’ God?” enquired Ozema, in a little surprise.  

“Not so, my poor benighted girl”—  

“What benighted?” interrupted the quick-witted Haytian, eagerly, for 

no term that the young man could or did apply to her, fell unheeded on her 

vigilant and attentive ear.  

“Benighted means those who have never heard of the cross, or of its 

endless mercies.”  

“Ozema no benighted now,” exclaimed the other, pressing the bauble 

to her bosom. “Got cross—keep cross—no benighted again, never. Cross, 

Mercedes”—for, by one of those mistakes that are not unfrequent in the 

commencement of all communications between those who speak different 

tongues, the young Indian had caught the notion, from many of Luis’s 

involuntary exclamations, that “Mercedes” meant all that was excellent. 

(II: 142-43) 

Examined carefully, there are many warnings in this exchange that Ozema is susceptible 

to misunderstanding. First, she is guilty of idolatry in thinking the cross might be Luis’s 

God instead of just a symbol (although Cooper’s Protestant readers would likely think 

that the Catholic Luis is a bit idolatrous here, too). Ozema’s interruption to ask the 

meaning of “benighted” seems to bode well for her acquisition of Spanish, but it also 

serves as a reminder of how much she does not yet know. Then, by calling the cross a 

“bauble,” Cooper suggests that it may be less significant than is believed by either party. 



 

94 

Finally, Ozema’s understanding is called into question by her persistent misinterpretation 

of Mercedes’s name. Not only does this indicate an error in Ozema’s Spanish vocabulary 

that Luis is either unable or strangely unwilling to correct, but it also suggests how 

ignorant Ozema remains of his romantic history and, consequently, of his possible 

intentions toward herself. By ignoring these many indications that Ozema’s cultural 

differences have led her to misinterpretation, Luis has failed to realize that this 

conversation means something different to her than it does to him. As will be revealed at 

the end of the novel, Ozema has mistakenly interpreted this exchange as a marriage 

ceremony. 

Despite the ferocity of the storm, Columbus and company do, of course, survive 

the passage home. After another section of historical description, the romantic plot is 

furthered when Sancho Mundo arrives at the court as a messenger from Columbus. 

Appearing before Isabella and Mercedes, Sancho quite understandably incites the latter’s 

jealousy when he describes “Doña Ozema” as under Luis’s particular attention, wearing 

Mercedes’s cross, and as one of “these Haytian dames” who “are simpler than our 

Spanish nobles, half of them thinking clothes of no great use, in that mild climate” (II: 

162). The trouble caused by this initial account deepens when Isabella questions Ozema. 

The girl declares, “Ozema now Luis’ wife. Luis marry Ozema, already” (II: 187). After 

repeated questioning, Isabella is certain that Ozema is not lying, so she concludes that 

Luis “hath already wedded the Indian, and she is, at this moment, his lawful wife” (II: 

187). Isabella adds, “But there can be no mistake. I have questioned the princess closely, 

and no doubt remaineth in my mind, that the nuptials have been solemnized by religious 

rites” (II: 188). Like Columbus and Luis, Isabella does not recognize that Ozema may 



 

95 

understand the word marriage and yet still misinterpret the Spanish concept. Seeing 

correctly that the girl is not lying, she jumps to the conclusion that, if Ozema considers 

herself to be Luis’s wife, she must be his “lawful wife” with “the nuptials . . . solemnized 

by religious rights.” 

When investigating the matter further, Isabella shows a similar blindness to 

cultural difference in the matter of Ozema’s status. Columbus tries to explain that he 

“consider[s] the rank of the lady Ozema to be less than royal, and more than noble, if our 

opinions will allow us to imagine a condition between the two,” but Isabella will not 

accept such a difference, declaring “station is station, and the rights of birth are not 

impaired by the condition of a country” (II: 195). This example continues Cooper’s 

positive portrayal of Columbus, as the admiral calls attention to the same nuance of 

cultural difference that the historical Columbus ignored in his desire to find a literal 

translation for “cacique.” Isabella, in contrast, insists that matters of nobility are universal 

and that Ozema’s rank be made to translate, demonstrating the imperialist attitude that 

assimilates all cultural differences into the dominant power’s own system of meaning. 

Finally, the conflict comes to a head when Isabella summons Luis before her to 

explain himself, and the queen’s rage almost threatens his execution. She first gives him 

two possibilities to which he may confess: either he has “cruelly deceived, by a feigned 

marriage, this uninstructed and confiding Indian princess,” or he has “insolently braved 

[his] sovereign with the professions of a desire to wed another, with [his] faith actually 

plighted at the altar, to another” (II: 198). Of course both of these interpretations are 

based on the assumption that Ozema has participated in Spanish versions of “lawful” and 

“religious nuptials.” Luis denies any wrongdoing, and the accusations continue for what 



 

96 

seems like a ridiculously long time. At last, the queen asks Ozema, “When and where 

didst thou meet him before a priest?” and the truth is finally revealed: Ozema understood 

Luis’s gift of the cross as a marriage ceremony (II: 201). Ozema may have learned the 

Spanish terms for husband and wife with ease, but she did not understand the full 

concepts. The misunderstanding was exacerbated by the Spaniards’ assumption that their 

own cultural conventions were universals. Because they viewed Spanish ceremonies and 

social codes as the only options, they proved unwilling or unable to see the differences in 

Haytian rituals and concepts. Instead, they imagined the Haytian people in a state of 

nature easily understood in Christian terms. Just as in Wilkes’s instructions for collecting 

native vocabularies, Cooper’s Spaniards mistakenly believed that translation between the 

Old and New World could be accomplished by a simple, one-to-one change in 

terminology. 

Yet Cooper’s own summary of the mistake leaves the question of how fully he 

embraces such an explanation uncertain: 

The result showed how naturally and cruelly the young Indian beauty had 

deceived herself. Ardent, confiding, and accustomed to be considered the 

object of general admiration among her own people, Ozema had fancied 

that her own inclinations had been fully answered by the young man. . . . 

The very want of language in words, by compelling a substitution of one 

in looks and acts, contributed to the mistake . . . . The false signification 

she attached to the word “Mercedes,” largely aided in the delusion, and it 

was completed by the manly tenderness and care with which our hero 

treated her on all occasions. (II: 203-204) 

Cooper seems to back away from the most insightful explanation of the incident in 

suggesting that Ozema has, like any love-sick girl, “deceived herself,” He places the 

burden of error on the native girl’s misunderstanding of the Spanish instead of the 

Spaniards’ misunderstanding of her. He does admit, however, that the problem was 



 

97 

exacerbated by communication difficulties. Cooper comes tantalizingly close to what 

might be a more modern reading of the events, but he still holds human weakness at fault 

rather than the irreconcilable differences between the two cultures. Although the 

misunderstanding between Luis, Ozema, and Mercedes does not cancel out all of the 

times Cooper presents communication between Europeans and Native Americans as 

unproblematic, or the latter as innocent and untouched by civilization, Cooper’s extended 

engagement with cross-cultural communication reinforces the valuation of linguistic 

difference made more apparent in his European travel writing. His emphasis on the 

specific cultural meaning of foreign terminology—difference that resists translation—

counteracts the imperialist tendency to see the language of the “savage” Other as either 

utterly incomprehensible or too easily translatable. Instead, his treatment of 

miscommunication in the colonial contact zone reveals the danger of these archetypal 

assumptions.  

Thus, Cooper begins in his later writings to raise some of the questions that will 

become the focus of works like Herman Melville’s Typee. Cooper is skeptical of the 

Spaniards’ wishful-thinking interpretation of both natural signs and native languages, but 

he believes in a universal and unambiguous reality behind language, even if the 

imperfection of language often hinders the expression of that reality.
22

 In contrast, 

                                                 
22

 This emphasis on a fixed reality beneath language is also apparent in the rational 

explanations Columbus provides for the omens and portents observed throughout the 

voyage, and the dedication to the laws of nature that these explanations reveal. For 

example, when the crew voice their fears about the erupting volcano, Columbus 

“[proceeds] to give his people an explanation of the causes of volcanoes” and “[tells] 

them that he look[s] upon this little eruption as merely a natural occurrence” (I: 231). 

Likewise, Cooper insists that Columbus “did not believe the sudden rising of the seas, on 

this occasion, was owing to a direct miracle, as some of the historians and biographers 



 

98 

Melville’s treatment of the inherent ambiguity in language suggests an underlying 

ambiguity in reality itself. The distinction is apparent in a resonance between the 

Columbus story and Moby-Dick. When a devotee of American literature reads of 

Columbus’s first voyage in Cooper’s novel, Irving’s history, or the reconstructed journal, 

the alternately hopeful and hopeless sailors seeking their reward for the first sight of land 

seem eerily reminiscent of the crew of the Pequod, tempted by Ahab’s doubloon into a 

mad search for the white whale. Both groups are driven by a single-minded captain, and 

both must accomplish the mission of their commander to ever see home again. But there 

is a difference between Ahab’s drive for revenge and Columbus’s certainty that he will 

find land by sailing west. Ahab’s misplaced monomania will lead only to destruction, but 

Columbus’s monomania proves genuinely prophetic, or so it seems in any retrospective 

history, because readers know that he will discover the New World. While Ahab’s failure 

demonstrates the limits of what William V. Spanos calls “the transcendentalist-inspired 

discourse of ‘self-reliance’” (Errant 45), Columbus’s success, as retold by Irving and 

Cooper, is the origin of such an exceptionalist American identity.
23

 Thus, as observed in 

the cosmopolitan philosophy of the Enlightenment, Cooper’s belief in a single 

ontological reality and a single ideological good can slip toward the universalizing 

assumptions that underwrite the discourse of imperialism, but his recognition of the 

                                                                                                                                                 

seem inclined to believe; but rather to a providential interference of Divine Power, 

through natural means” (II: 46).  

23
 Similarly, Robert Tally argues, “By positing an inhuman force of infinite extension 

over the finite American Adam, by subverting the foundations of individualism (the 

individual subject and its agency), and by evacuating the myth of God’s mandate, of His 

power to reward or punish, Moby-Dick effectively dismantles the dominant American 

ideological system undergirding such notions as manifest destiny” (84). 



 

99 

inevitability of cross-cultural misunderstanding, and his resistance to the idea of easy 

translatability, work against this universalizing assumption, leading him to present a 

critique of imperialism through language that often anticipates, if it does not quite match, 

the later works of Melville. 

Incommensurable Economics in Mercedes and The Crater 

As Mercedes of Castile demonstrates, the representation of linguistic difference is 

a good indicator of Cooper’s attitudes toward non-Western cultures, but language was not 

the only arena in which the battle for cultural dominance and survival was played out. 

Rather, it is only one example of a variety of epistemological systems at stake in the 

cross-cultural encounters of American expansionism. The incommensurability of 

concepts that caused Columbus, and Cooper’s Luis, such problems communicating with 

the strange peoples of the New World has a strong parallel in the similar incompatibility 

of value systems. As in the colonizer’s attempts at linguistic translation, the problem is 

not merely finding which terms are equivalent—matching “one” to “uno” or “eins”—but 

that, in many cases, the concepts the words name do not align, just as “cacique” does not 

match any Spanish title. Analogously, economic exchange requires more than a 

conversion of dollars to pounds or yen, because the entire system of value may be 

incompatible, just as Western currencies are not directly translatable into a gift-based 

economy.
24

 Thus, Todorov argues, “Nor more than in the case of languages does 

Columbus understand that values are conventional, that gold is not more precious than 

glass ‘in itself,’ but only in the European system of exchange” (38). Just as Columbus 

                                                 
24

 See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. 



 

100 

cannot comprehend that “savage” cultures may have different concepts than Europe, he 

does not understand that the hawk’s-bells and other trinkets given to the natives are not 

inherently less valuable than the gold sought by the Spaniards. And just as Columbus 

views the natives he encounters as lacking a real language, he also deems them childish 

or irrational for the trades they are willing to make rather than recognizing their equally 

valid yet radically different system of value. 

Before turning to the issue of economic incommensurability in both Mercedes of 

Castile and The Crater, it is useful to take a brief look at the theoretical and historical 

concept of the “fetish” in order to clarify the connection such incommensurability has to 

language. Although there are obvious differences between the native peoples of the 

Americas and the people encountered by the Portuguese on the coast of Africa, the 

concept of the fetish that arose from the latter encounter offers valuable insight into both 

cultural clashes. In a series of articles about “the problem of the fetish,” William Pietz 

argues that the fetish “not only originated from, but remains specific to, the problematic 

of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of 

radically heterogeneous social systems” (“Fetish, I” 7).
25

 In other words, European 

                                                 
25

 Pietz’s primary focus is the history of the “fetish” as it “originated in the cross-cultural 

spaces” of the African coast, developed into a theory of religious “fetishism” by 1800, 

and was then adopted into numerous theoretical models throughout the nineteenth and 

twentieth centuries, such as those of Marx and Freud (“Fetish, I” 5; “Fetish, II” 23). The 

term “fetish” itself may be tangential to the study of imperialism in Cooper, but the 

disconnect in value systems that produces it, and the inextricability of such problems of 

exchange from problems of language, illuminate an important connection between the 

play with linguistic sign systems evident in Mercedes of Castile (as well as in Homeward 

Bound or even in Katharine’s signal language in The Pilot) and the critique of U.S. 

expansionary trade policy and missionary activity found in The Crater. With or without 

the particular discourse of “fetishism,” an encounter with radically different cultures will 

produce this disconnection of value, this untranslatability. 



 

101 

traders found African value systems incompatible not only with European terminology 

for the use and worth of objects but also with their prior understanding of how objects 

could be used and valued. Just as the Africans’ valuation of objects was incompatible 

with European systems of value, the concepts Europeans had for ceremonial objects, such 

as the idol, were incompatible with the Africans’ concepts of the culturally particular 

objects classed together under the term “fetish.” The kind of object-use found in Africa 

was simply untranslatable into European language. The traders responded to this utter 

incompatibility with a new term for a new idea, one which served as a kind of stopgap for 

this radical incommensurability but which never resolved into easy understandability. 

Moreover, the word “fetish,” which Pietz describes as both “the failed translation of 

various African terms” and “a novel word responsive to an unprecedented type of 

situation,” came into being to explain the problems of trade as well as to fill a gap in 

European terminology (“Fetish, I” 6). Just as the incongruity of concepts prevented a 

simple one-to-one translation, the radical incompatibility of value systems prevented a 

straightforward exchange of commodities.  

One example Pietz offers of the incompatibility of value systems is the “category 

of the trifling,” the tendency of “European traders [to remark] on the trinkets and trifles 

they traded for objects of real value” (“Fetish, I” 9). As Pietz explains, “While it was 

precisely such ‘false’ estimation of the value of things that provided the desired huge 

profit rates of early European traders, it also evoked a contempt for a people who valued 

‘trifles’ and ‘trash’” ( “Fetish, II” 41). In Mercedes of Castile, Sancho Mundo is the 

master of the exchange of trifles. Never “forgetful of his duty on the subject of searching 

for gold,” he eschews any attempt at linguistic communication, having “neither acquired 



 

102 

a single word of the Haytian language, nor taught a syllable of Spanish to even one of the 

laughing nymphs who surrounded him,” and instead “[decorates] the persons of many of 

them with hawk’s-bells, and [contrives] to abstract from them, in return, every ornament 

that resembled the precious metal, which they possessed” (II: 107). Greedy for gold, 

Sancho is quick to gain the most profit possible in his exchange of trifles for treasure. 

Cooper criticizes Sancho’s principles of “free trade” because they “[maintain] that trade 

is merely an exchange of equivalents; overlooking all the adverse circumstances which 

may happen, just at the moment, to determine the standard of value” (II: 107). In other 

words, Cooper denies that the items are “equivalent” at the going rate of exchange, just as 

he elsewhere insists that translations of a word are never precisely “equivalent” to the 

original. He suggests that allowing the free market to determine value might compromise 

other moral considerations. 

Cooper’s ethical issues with free trade become clearer when Sancho shows Luis 

his acquired gold and exclaims: 

“Double that, Señor Conde; just double that; and all for the price of some 

seventeen hawk’s-bells, that cost but a handful of maravedis. By the mass! 

this is a most just and holy trade, and such as it becomes us Christians to 

carry on. Here are these savages, they think no more of gold than your 

excellency thinks of a dead Moor, and to be revenged on them, I hold a 

hawk’s-bell just as cheap. Let them think as poorly as they please of their 

ornaments and yellow dust, they will find me just as willing to part with 

the twenty hawk’s-bells that remain. Let them barter away, they will find 

me as ready as they possibly can be, to give nothing for nothing.” (II: 107) 

While it is clear that Cooper does not condone Sancho’s actions, he gives the early 

capitalist a sophisticated defense. Sancho rightly observes that the “savages” care as little 

for their gold as the Spaniard does for his bells, making the trade one of “nothing for 

nothing.” Yet the invocation of “a dead Moor” emphasizes the other atrocities undertaken 



 

103 

by the Spanish in the name of the Catholic Church, suggesting that such arguments are a 

poor excuse for the injustices resulting from “free trade.” This objection is voiced by 

Luis, who questions whether such trade is “quite honest” and suggests, “Remember thou 

art a Castilian, and henceforth give two hawk’s-bells, where thou hast hitherto given but 

one” (II: 108). With “a nobleman’s contempt for commerce,” Luis then reasons, “If it be 

honest to profit by the ignorance of another . . . then it is just to deceive the child and the 

idiot” (II: 108). While Sancho advocates the capitalist’s ruthless drive to make as much 

money as possible, however unjust the means, Luis’s “noble” solution is that those with 

the lion’s share of power and money be just a bit more charitable. In the process, Luis 

equates the less fortunate with other dependents incapable of making their own rational 

decisions, and such paternalism can be just as dangerous as Sancho’s ruthless 

acquisitiveness. 

In his characterization of Sancho and Luis, Cooper presents two equally 

problematic extremes. The free market might allow for the most equitable exchange of 

goods when all other factors are equal and everyone is playing by the same rules, but 

when two radically different cultures clash, commodities not only have different values, 

but they are valued differently—a difference that is not only quantitative but qualitative. 

When colliding systems of value prove incommensurable, the “free” market can easily 

become distorted by the party with the most power. This is the problem with Sancho 

Mundo’s exploitative trade practices. On the other hand, Luis’s aristocratic solution of 

philanthropy is problematic as well. Rather than attempt to understand and negotiate the 

differences in value systems, Luis’s philosophy places the “savage” in a dependent 

position, showing greater kindness than Sancho’s cutthroat capitalism, but affording no 



 

104 

greater respect for cultural difference. This divide mirrors the imperialist’s paradoxical 

desire to see radical difference as either too easily translatable (convertible into Western 

economics) or utterly unknowable (and thus unworthy of respect or preservation). Thus, 

in terms of economic exchange as with language and culture, Cooper maps out both 

extremes, but while he criticizes some unjust practices, he seems unable to imagine the 

middle ground of cultural relativism that he advocates so strongly in his European 

writings. 

This division between exploitation and the West’s civilizing mission is even more 

obvious in The Crater (1847), which shows the continuation of Sancho’s trading 

practices into the expansionary policies of Cooper’s present. One of Cooper’s last novels, 

The Crater depicts the rise and downfall of a society due to the kind of democratic 

excesses that Cooper criticizes in many of his later works, and it engages directly with 

America’s expansionary policies.
26

 Cooper was personally acquainted with Charles 

Wilkes, head of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, and it is clear that Cooper drew on 

                                                 
26

 Several critics have equated the novel to Thomas Cole’s famous series of paintings, 

The Course of Empire (T. Philbrick, James 234-35; Axelrad, 4-5). According to John P. 

McWilliams, “Cooper’s obliteration of the Crater republic can only be viewed as the 

outgrowth of years of brooding about the inability of a republic to resist the powers of 

demagoguery” (Political 347). George J. Becker argues that the novel “serves as a 

warning against the contemporary tendencies which are about to bring down the whole 

edifice of society” (332). More specifically, Dekker describes how the novel illustrates, 

“how ‘the people’ are easily duped and how they abuse their freedoms, victimizing 

Cooper’s genteel, well-heeled heroes and heroines” (245). Although earlier critics of The 

Crater ignore the particulars of its setting, seeing the Pacific as “a blank slate” for a 

largely allegorical story (Motley qtd. C. Adams 204; see also McWilliams, Political 370; 

or Scudder 116), more recent work has shifted the focus to Cooper’s treatment of the 

United States’ Pacific expansion (Gentry; Suzuki). Among the many who read The 

Crater in its geographical context, Lisa West Norwood notes the somewhat surprising 

fact that Cooper published the novel after Melville’s Typee, arguing that “these authors 

have a moment when they are engaged with similar subjects and issues at the same time” 

including “American presence in the Pacific.” 



 

105 

Wilkes’s narrative for his novel of Pacific colonization.
27

 While the protagonist Mark 

Woolston’s failed colony ultimately offers few solutions, Cooper’s presentation of both 

sides of economic imperialism questions the proper attitude toward all kinds of cultural 

difference, religious and economic as well as linguistic. Cooper critiques the most 

obvious injustices of American policy, yet he ultimately fails to unmask the equally 

insidious cultural conquest of the West’s civilizing mission. 

Cooper’s novel depicts the expansion of trade into the Pacific that motivated 

Wilkes’s expedition, trade fueled in part by the high prices goods such as sandalwood 

and sea-otter pelts would bring on the Chinese market (N. Philbrick 13). It is on such a 

trading voyage, “to proceed to some of the islands of the Pacific, in quest of a cargo of 

sandal-wood and bêche-lê-mar, for the Chinese market” (I: 29), that Mark and his 

companion Bob Betts are first marooned on a barren reef. And mirroring the Expedition’s 

military purpose, their ship “[t]he Rancocus carried several guns, an armament prepared 

to repel the savages of the sandal-wood islands” (I: 57). Commerce in sandalwood, 

though dangerous, was lucrative because it capitalized on discrepancies in economic and 

cultural value systems. When American traders exchanged worthless (by Western 

standards) trifles for this valuable commodity, they, like Columbus and the African-coast 

traders described by Pietz, reaped extreme profits from a society with a radically different 

economic system. These American traders could then profit further from the ceremonial 

value placed on sandalwood by the Chinese, another cultural difference that translated 

into major financial gains. 

                                                 
27

 The connection between Cooper and Wilkes was first noted in W. B. Gates’s source 

study (243-45), and it was more recently examined by Charles H. Adams as a reason for 

exploring Cooper’s engagement with “American expansionism” (205).  



 

106 

Such trading missions were so lucrative because they exploited the 

incommensurable economies of the islands where sandalwood grew. Like Native 

Americans or sixteenth-century West Africans, these natives seemed content to exchange 

valuable commodities for mere trifles. Cooper emphasizes the worthlessness of the items 

intended for trade when he explains, “The cargo of the Rancocus was of no great extent, 

and of little value in a civilized country,” and “[t]he beads and coarse trinkets with which 

it had been intended to trade with the savages, were of no use whatever” (I: 90). These 

“coarse trinkets” are the same kind of trifles used by Sancho Mundo to trade for gold, and 

like his hawk’s-bells, they are not worth much by Western standards. Cooper more 

clearly criticizes what he sees as an exploitative practice when he reiterates, “Of real 

cargo, indeed, she had very little, the commerce between the civilized man and the 

savage being ordinarily on those great principles of Free Trade . . . which usually give the 

lion’s share of the profit to them who need it least” (I: 97). As Rochelle Raineri Zuck 

argues, Cooper’s comments on the evils of “Free Trade” suggest that “commercial 

exchange with Native people is . . . another means of taking advantage of them” (75). The 

Americans involved in Pacific trade take this advantage whenever they can, never 

inquiring why the island natives might value the “trifling” trinkets they are willing to take 

in exchange for “valuable” sandalwood, and for Cooper, this is the worst kind of 

exploitation. 

Yet this exploitative trade, which capitalizes on cultural differences without 

understanding or appreciating them, is not the only way in which Americans approached 

the Pacific and its inhabitants. In The Crater, Cooper opposes free trade to a more 

charitable alternative, which he seems to endorse, but which can be just as damaging to 



 

107 

native cultures. While describing the contents of the Rancocus, which are the only 

resources Mark has on his reef, Cooper explains the ship owner’s misgivings about the 

sandalwood trade: 

The provision of tools was very ample, and, in some respects, a little 

exaggerated in the way of Friend White’s expectations of civilizing the 

people of Fejee. . . . Now, sandal-wood was supposed to be used for the 

purposes of idolatry, being said to be burned before the gods of that 

heathenish people. Idolatry being one of the chiefest of all sins, Friend 

Abraham White had many compunctions and misgivings of conscience 

touching the propriety of embarking in the trade at all. It was true, that our 

knowledge of the Chinese customs did not extend far enough to render it 

certain that the wood was used for the purpose of burning before idols, 

some pretending it was made into ornamental furniture; but Friend 

Abraham White had heard the first, and was disposed to provide a set-off, 

in the event of the report’s being true, by endeavouring to do something 

towards the civilization of the heathen. . . . It is true that he expected to 

make many thousands of dollars by the voyage, and doubtless would so 

have done, had not the accident befallen the ship, . . . but the investment in 

tools, seeds, pigs, wheelbarrows, and other matters, honestly intended to 

better the condition of the natives of Vanua Levu and Viti Levu, did not 

amount to a single cent less than one thousand dollars, lawful money of 

the republic. (I: 102-103) 

The profit potential of sandalwood is high because of its religious value in China, but for 

Friend Abraham, taking advantage of its value makes one an accessory to idolatry. To 

offset this potential sin, Abraham plans to provide the Pacific Islanders with useful 

material goods—commodities carefully calculated to be not “a single cent less than one 

thousand dollars, lawful money of the republic.” Yet, as with Luis’s suggestion to give 

two hawk’s-bells instead of one, the small portion of the voyage’s potential profits spent 

on such tools seems hardly to address the moral problem.  

Even more disturbingly, this “provision of tools” will prove valuable to the 

natives only so far as they adopt Western forms of agriculture. Despite Friend Abraham’s 

amusing rationalization, Cooper presents the ship’s vast store of seeds and other 



 

108 

instruments of civilization in a positive light. They allow Mark not only to survive on the 

reef, but also to literally plant the seeds of a colony that will eventually support hundreds 

of settlers. Thus, Cooper’s novel mirrors another aim of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, to 

“make such arrangements as will insure a supply of fruits, vegetables, and fresh 

provisions, to vessels visiting it hereafter, teaching the natives the modes of cultivation, 

and encouraging them to raise hogs in greater abundance” (Wilkes xxvii). Although the 

instructions suggest that the expedition “neither interfere, nor permit any wanton 

interference with the customs, habits, manners, or prejudices, of the natives of such 

countries or islands as [it] may visit” (xxviii), they appear to overlook the cultural and 

ecological changes that new crops, livestock, and farming techniques will inevitably 

bring. The Americans designing the expedition are so blind to the culture of these islands, 

that they do not consider how teaching the inhabitants Western modes of cultivation 

might interfere with their native modes of subsistence—not to mention how American 

trade itself might upset the native economy. Wilkes further demonstrates the drive to 

Americanize foreign cultures when he boasts, “I have reason to rejoice that I have been 

enabled to carry the moral influence of our country to every quarter of the globe where 

our flag has waved” (xxii-xxiii). Despite its superficial intentions of observing native 

culture without interference, the result of the expedition, and of the increased trade it 

made possible, was the erosion of native culture alongside the extinction of “valuable 

commodities” like seals and sandalwood. Yet for most of The Crater, Mark’s project of 

“civilizing” the island in order to grow crops and support livestock is depicted as a noble 

one, and his reef becomes the kind of hospitable port that the U.S. Exploring Expedition 

sought to create. 



 

109 

The U.S. government desired the Pacific Islanders to learn more advanced 

farming techniques so that they would have a surplus of food with which to supply the 

whalers and other commercial vessels seeking port in the Pacific. Another requirement 

for the security of Pacific commerce was that the native inhabitants respect Western ideas 

of property. The government’s instructions warn Wilkes: 

Among savage nations, unacquainted with, or possessing but vague ideas 

of the rights of property, the most common cause of collision with 

civilized visitors, is the offence and punishment of theft. You will 

therefore adopt every possible precaution against this practice, and in the 

recovery of the stolen property, as well as in punishing the offender, use 

all due moderation and forbearance. (xxviii) 

Thus, property appears as a key distinction between civilization and savagery. The 

tendency of this economic incommensurability to lead to violence is one reason that the 

Rancocus is also supplied with a store of weapons. Despite the advice of “forbearance” in 

the above passage, the belief that the “civilized” idea of property should hold precedence 

even in foreign lands is clear, as is the smug disregard for the possibility that the 

Americans might do something considered equally unacceptable by the local culture, or 

that these offenses might be just as disruptive as native theft.  

In The Crater as in his other writings, Cooper maintains the importance of 

property, as numerous critics have noted.
28

 As soon as Mark progresses beyond the initial 

                                                 
28

 Steven Watts argues that, for Cooper, “[p]roperty . . . was the basis of all civilization 

and its protection was critical to social improvement” (70). Robert Lawson-Peebles’s 

argument is particularly relevant to the changing economy of the Crater colony when he 

describes how Cooper’s political beliefs are dependent upon an idea of property that was 

quickly becoming out of date as an agrarian system was replaced by a business-oriented 

one (341-42). Rochelle Raineri Zuck (65) and Daniel Marder (36) also note the 

importance of private property. In contrast to these views, however, Charles O’Donnell 

argues that Cooper had “an ambivalent attitude toward property,” one in which the 

“inevitable initial action” of claiming the land “is the start of a chain of evil linking father 

and son” (404). 



 

110 

steps of cultivating his islands, and after he is joined by other colonists, he divides the 

land and gives each resident his own private property. Cooper explains that this decision 

will increase the productivity of the society because, “[s]o long as a man toiled for 

himself and those nearest and dearest to him, society had a security for his doing much, 

that would be wanting where the proceeds of the entire community were to be shared in 

common” (II: 93-94). Thus, Cooper is particularly careful to separate Mark’s colony from 

communal experiments like the one at Brook Farm. In addition to protecting each 

individual’s private land, Mark also takes great pains to protect the entire colony, the new 

white colonists’ property, from being invaded and looted by the hostile natives nearby. In 

the repeated efforts to keep the villainous Waally away from his own group of islands, 

Mark enacts the U.S. Exploring Expedition’s policing of theft. Both policies result in the 

killing of large numbers of natives. 

The dual projects of cultivating the land and establishing private property are 

demonstrated on a smaller scale by the “success story” of one of Cooper’s “good 

Indians,” Unus. If this Pacific Islander’s name seems reminiscent of The Last of the 

Mohicans’s Uncas, there is little difference between the characters other than the much 

smaller part Unus has to play in his novel’s plot. After greatly aiding the colonists in one 

of the conflicts with his tribe, Unus marries Juno, a former slave of Mark’s wife, Bridget. 

The newly converted “Indian” is thus united to an earlier conquest of the West’s 

civilizing mission. Cooper reports of this happy couple:  

We may add here, that Unus and Juno were united before the ship sailed. 

They took up land on the Peak, where Unus erected for himself a very neat 

cabin. Bridget set the young couple up, giving the furniture, a pig, some 

fowls, and other necessaries. (II: 60) 



 

111 

Thus, the couple’s success, almost a fairy-tale ending, is defined by their ownership of 

property and their ability to raise livestock. Unus has been properly civilized. Eventually, 

after a minister joins the colony, the two are given a Christian marriage ceremony, “the 

governor considering it proper that regard to appearances and all decent observances, 

should be paid, as comported with their situation” (II: 91). In this additional concession to 

Western culture, Unus and Juno are joined by a similarly mixed couple, and another 

success story of civilization, “Peters and his Indian wife” (II: 91). The white Peters 

originally met his wife, Unus’s sister, while living with her tribe after being shipwrecked, 

but the two make the “proper” decision and join Mark’s civilization as soon as they are 

able. Although Peters joins these native siblings in acting as interpreters for the colony, 

the presumably difficult process by which Peters would have learned the language of the 

nearby natives is not a part of Cooper’s novel, although similar encounters will be the 

focus of many of Melville’s works. The value of such bilingualism and the genuine cross-

cultural communication it permits may seem like a glimmer of hope for achieving a more 

balanced cultural intercourse, but these interpreters serve little purpose besides hastening 

the progress of Western values. With all religious formalities duly observed, the 

exemplary products of Mark’s civilizing project slip into the background of the novel and 

would seem to live happily ever after, at least until the entire colony is swallowed by the 

ocean. 

From one perspective, then, it appears that Cooper’s only solution to Sancho’s 

exploitative trading practices, like the solution of extreme cosmopolite Anacharsis Cloots 

to worldwide oppression and violence, is to gather all peoples under a single system of 

civilization. Supporting this critical view of Cooper’s own imperialist tendencies, Paul 



 

112 

Lyons gives an excellent summary of the various encounters with natives in the novel: 

“Cooper’s allegory is specific and unambivalent. Those neighboring Islanders who assent 

to the colonial authority are treated with paternalistic kindness; those who resist are rolled 

over militarily” (American 69). Thus Lyons argues that “Cooper sees Oceanians being 

integrated into the world system to the degree that they adopt Euroamerican trading 

protocols and form nation-states” (71). Cooper does not necessarily wish to see these 

Pacific “Indians” vanish like the native peoples of North America, but he does not see a 

place for their native value systems in a global economy. 

Such an apparent preference for Western civilization is undercut, however, by the 

novel’s cataclysmic ending. If the result of any civilization’s rapid progress is its speedier 

decline, are the Pacific natives best left alone to advance toward the inevitable downfall 

at their own gradual pace? Cooper’s conclusion only begins to answer this question: 

Let those who would substitute the voice of the created for that of the 

Creator, who shout “the people, the people,” instead of hymning the 

praises of their God, who vainly imagine that the masses are sufficient for 

all things, remember their insignificance and tremble. They are but mites 

amid millions of other mites, that the goodness of providence has 

produced for its own wise ends; their boasted countries, with their vaunted 

climates and productions, have temporary possessions of but small 

portions of a globe that floats, a point, in space, following the course 

pointed out by an invisible finger, and which will one day be suddenly 

struck out of its orbit, as it was originally put there, by the hand that made 

it. Let that dread Being, then, be never made to act a second part in human 

affairs, or the rebellious vanity of our race imagine that either numbers, or 

capacity, or success, or power in arms, is aught more than a short-lived 

gift of His beneficence, to be resumed when His purposes are 

accomplished. (II: 227) 

On one hand, the hubris that causes the colony’s downfall, its trust in the power of 

“numbers,” “capacity,” “success,” and “arms,” seems to point the accusing finger at the 

arrogance of imperialists who would presume to exert their creative power over the less 



 

113 

powerful or worse endowed. At the same time, Cooper’s invocation of such an apparently 

Christian higher power cannot be reconciled with a plea for cultural relativism. It seems 

that Cooper, like America’s more tolerant Puritan settlers, believes there is a universal 

right, but that it is never the place of mere mortals to impose that right onto others. 

 

In the end, Cooper’s critique of imperialist discourse, and his plea to treat others 

with greater sympathy and kindness, stops short of recognizing that different approaches 

to life may be equally valid. Cooper comes closest to this ideal in his portrayal of 

language, recognizing the incommensurability of cultural concepts that resists easy 

translation, but he does not fully question his own assumptions about cultural and 

economic value.
29

 While Cooper begins to examine the problems of cross-cultural 

exchange, he never quite arrives at the realization that there is no proper set of concepts 

or attitudes, instead suggesting that all the world’s peoples be assimilated into Western 

civilization. As examined in the following chapter, Melville will take Cooper’s critique of 

language encounters further, not only depicting the paradoxical extremes of utter 

incomprehensibility and too easy translation, but actively seeking out a more liberatory 

middle ground.

                                                 
29

 The greater cultural relativism of which Cooper falls short is not a modern construct. A 

nineteenth-century version can be found in Walden, in which Thoreau weighs the costs 

and advantages of “civilized” and “savage” life and seeks a way to “live as to secure all 

the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage” (74). Thoreau’s project of 

stripping away one’s own cultural assumptions in order to choose what is really most 

advantageous from the many ways of approaching life mirrors Cooper’s own approach to 

European difference, and may be a solution to the contentious contact of native and 

imperialist Cooper explores in his later works. 



 

114 

CHAPTER 3 

FRAUGHT TRANSLATION IN MELVILLE’S COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS 

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the United States was expanding 

its commercial, political, and military interests beyond the boundaries of North America, 

and the wide network of whalers, merchants, explorers, scientists, and other sailors who 

drove this change traveled throughout the Eastern and Southern hemispheres. In works 

like The Crater and Afloat and Ashore, James Fenimore Cooper comments on his 

country’s Pacific expansion from afar. But at the same time that Cooper was writing his 

final sea tales, the young Herman Melville was experiencing such voyages firsthand, 

gathering materials for a literary career that would extend Cooper’s critique of imperialist 

discourse even further. Cooper’s cosmopolitan approach to European language transfers 

at least partially to his portrayal of colonial language encounters, but Melville comes far 

closer to a cosmopolitan appreciation of non-white cultures and the languages they speak.  

This chapter will examine how the language encounters Melville experienced in 

his Pacific travels led to a career-long engagement with the limits of translation and the 

failures of communication they cause. By connecting Melville’s semiotic critique of 

language to the lived experiences of translation and cross-cultural encounter, I will 

combine the previous approaches of poststructuralism and postcolonialism, 

demonstrating how Melville’s decentered approach to language and reality derives from 

the experience of travel.
1
 Over time, Melville shifts the target of his critique from 

                                                 
1
 Addressing Melville’s treatment of language through a poststructuralist lens, Maurice S. 

Lee argues that “Moby-Dick offers a kind of proto-deconstructionist critique—one in 

which intertextuality, self-reference, and parody turn language on itself” (“Language” 

405). Similarly, William Spanos connects the linguistic decentering of Melville in Moby-

Dick to the discourse of American exceptionalism when he contrasts “Captain Ahab’s 



 

115 

imperialist views of “savage” speech to all universalist theories of language, thereby 

questioning the positivist vision of Truth that underpins such universalism. 

Like Cooper, Melville also exposes and negotiates the double-bind of imperialist 

discourse, the paradoxical desire to both emphasize difference and to efface it. The first 

error can be seen in the U.S. Exploring Expedition’s expectation that the words of new 

languages will correspond perfectly to Western concepts. Eric Cheyfitz summarizes such 

linguistic blindness when he argues, “The imperialist believes that, literally, everything 

can be translated into his terms; indeed, that everything always already exists in these 

terms and is only waiting to be liberated” (Poetics 195). This connection between the 

will-to-power of colonialist discourse and the assumption of easy and “literal” 

translatability suffuses the literature of exploration and conquest that Melville uses as the 

source for his own books. By assuming that the language, culture, and value systems of 

                                                                                                                                                 

New World discourse of self-reliance” with “Ishmael/Melville,” who “call[s] language as 

naming into question” (Errant 123, 175). Other critics who have taken a poststructuralist 

approach include Nancy Fredricks, who argues that “Ishmael circumvents the totalizing 

thrust of teleological structures” and “directs attention to the limits of representation” 

(52); Bernhard Radloff, who calls “Melville’s thought . . . a confrontation with modernity 

understood as the program of humanist rationalism” (1); and Sam Whitsitt, who examines 

Melville’s treatment of the nineteenth century’s “naïve sense of the relation . . . between 

language and being” (59). Other readings have focused on the importance of travel in the 

development of Melville’s cosmopolitan or global perspective.
 
For example, both Paul 

Giles (56) and Malcolm Bradbury (138) emphasize the centrality of travel in Melville’s 

body of work, and Thomas Farel Heffernan examines Melville’s interest in travel 

literature (35). Sanford Marovitz calls Melville “among the most widely traveled of 

American authors” (19), and Christopher Sten describes him as “America’s most 

cosmopolitan writer of his time—the most widely traveled, with the broadest cultural 

experience and the most carefully considered views on . . . colonialism and cultural 

imperialism” (“Melville’s” 38). Charles Waugh finds in Melville’s writings “a global 

consciousness at work” (205), and both Mary K. Edwards (xii-xiii) and Paul Lyons 

(“Global” 56) connect this global perspective to Melville’s own experience in America’s 

Pacific expansion. Peter Gibian perhaps best summarizes this connection when he argues 

that Melville “continually focuses attention on the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter 

and the question of intercultural mediation” (20-21). 



 

116 

the Other can translate seamlessly into English, American imperialists erase cultural 

difference while granting their own beliefs and practices universal status. But the 

opposite extreme, described by David Spurr as the “rhetorical tradition in which non-

Western peoples are essentially denied the power of language and are represented as 

mute or incoherent” (104), can be equally dangerous, and the ideal mean between these 

two prejudicial extremes can be difficult to achieve. Accordingly, my argument that 

Melville explores the limits of translation must recognize that a too-easy capitulation to 

the incomprehensibility of difference risks sliding into a refusal to recognize the speech 

of the Other—a refusal to allow the Other a voice both in a political sense and as part of 

recognizing his or her humanity.  

One alternative to these dual forms of linguistic prejudice would be the kind of 

fluency that occurs only after one begins to think in a new language, fluency that makes 

the act of translation unnecessary. A parallel cultural fluency would likewise require 

understanding a new culture’s beliefs and practices on its own terms. In the situations 

Melville depicts, however, such fluency is impossible for the traveler who has only 

recently arrived in a foreign land. In this contact zone of linguistic encounter, the only 

solution to the paradox of imperialist discourse is an ongoing struggle for mutual 

comprehension. It is out of such a contact zone that pidgin languages develop—linguistic 

compromises that facilitate the exchange of both ideas and goods. More often, simply 

recognizing the inherent difficulties of cross-cultural communication is the only 

alternative to the imperialist extremes of utter incomprehension and universalizing 

translation. To escape this prejudicial binary, it is necessary to understand that translation 

is only a linguistic compromise, not a substitute for real fluency.  



 

117 

In his earlier works portraying cross-cultural encounters in the Pacific, Melville, 

like Cooper, maps out a middle ground between the oversimplification of the translator’s 

task and a capitulation to the utter incomprehensibility of the Other. In later works, 

Melville combines the influence of his own sailing experiences with broader 

philosophical inquiries, increasingly portraying the lack of cross-cultural understanding 

as inherent incommensurability. He thus develops his earlier examination of linguistic 

encounter into the realization that all language is a pidgin compromise between 

incomprehensibility and the universalist beliefs that justify imperialism’s civilizing 

mission. 

The Portrayal of “Savage” Language in Typee’s Imperialist Sources 

A thorough examination of Melville’s early works as travel literature must begin 

with the sources that shaped his writing. David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the 

Pacific Ocean (1815) and C. S. Stewart’s A Visit to the South Seas (1831) are two well-

established sources of Typee.
2
 John Samson argues that Melville’s narrators dramatize the 

role narratives such as those of Porter and Stewart have played in the creation of 

imperialist stereotypes and the maintenance of American ideology (213).
3
 In his 

                                                 
2
 The links between Melville’s writings and earlier, imperialist accounts do not end here. 

Amasa Delano’s A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern 

Hemispheres is the obvious source of “Benito Cereno, ” and many critics have also seen 

connections between Melville’s work and Charles Wilkes’s Narrative of the United 

States Exploring Expedition (Lyons, American 73, 96; Madison, “Literature” 287; Heflin 

175), as well as Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional account, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon 

Pym of Nantucket (Martin 27; Fanning 162; Renker 14; M. Berthold, “Portentous” 560; 

Brodhead 34). See Chapter Two for discussions of Wilkes and Poe. 

3
 John Bryant further describes Melville’s complicated relationship with the narratives of 

Porter and Stewart. Although Melville critiques their more imperialist attitudes, these 

sources also demonstrate “a certain Hobbesian rationalism” (Porter) and a “half-baked 



 

118 

representation of colonial language encounters, Melville directly addresses the failures of 

cross-cultural communication previous works of exploration would seek to conceal. 

Examining the narratives of Porter and Stewart, it becomes clear that Melville’s 

predecessors emphasize the savagery of native language while, paradoxically, 

minimizing the difficulties of translation. In other words, in Porter and Stewart, as in 

Columbus and Wilkes, the language of the Other either presents no interpretive 

difficulties or appears as animal noise not worthy of translation. 

The narratives of Porter and Stewart also represent two sides of American 

influence in the Pacific. Porter’s attempt to annex the Marquesas for the United States 

makes his narrative the more obviously imperialist.
4
 Christopher McBride connects 

Porter to the history of U.S. imperialism when he describes how “Porter’s claim 

established [the Marquesas] in the American imagination as a possible site for overseas 

expansion and trade” (“Americans” 165). Stewart, on the other hand, is a missionary like 

those Melville critiques in Typee and Omoo. His narrative emphasizes both religion and 

science, echoing the militaristic imperialism of Porter with the parallel goals of 

expanding Western culture and ways of knowing. 

Both sources contain the stereotype of primitive and childlike natives found in the 

writings of Columbus and critiqued by Cooper in Mercedes of Castile, and both extend 

                                                                                                                                                 

liberalism” (Stewart) that Melville draws on to develop his own “more radical anti-

imperialism” (Bryant, Unfolding 236). In contrast, Justin D. Edwards argues that Melville 

could not break away from the “imperial frame of reference” of his sources, leading to 

“Typee’s reinscription of the same colonizing attitudes that Melville claimed to be 

critiquing” (23).  

4
 Porter also renamed the islands the Washington Group, mirroring Columbus by 

replacing native designations with his own language. 



 

119 

this stereotype to the denigration of native language. Porter belittles Marquesan culture 

generally when he asserts, “In religion these people are mere children; their morais are 

their baby-houses, and their gods are their dolls” (II: 119). He similarly devalues native 

language when he writes, “We had but little opportunity of gaining a knowledge of their 

language while we remained among them; but from the little we became acquainted with, 

we are satisfied that it is not copious; few words serve to express all they wish to say; and 

one word has many significations” (II: 49). In addition to the implication that the 

primitive Marquesans have little to say, the arrogance of thus presuming to judge the 

extent of a language that is only partially understood demonstrates the little esteem Porter 

holds for Marquesan culture. Lawrence Alan Rosenwald has called the creation of such a 

“value-hierarchy of languages . . . an error” and the “linguistic form of racism” (18). A 

more extreme version of such racism is “denying that a particular language is a language 

at all” (18), and this belittlement can occur not only through direct statements but also 

through the general characterization of supposedly savage speech. One example of this 

more subtle linguistic racism occurs in Stewart’s description of his arrival on Nukuhiva:
 5

 

“The reveillé had scarce been beaten this morning, before the Vincennes was surrounded 

by the noise, loud talking, hallooing, and various rude merriment of the islanders” (I: 

207). Stewart thus depicts the incomprehensibility of the natives’ language as 

obstreperous and “rude” noise rather than proper speech. 

At the same time, both Porter and Stewart minimize the difficulties of cross-

cultural communication and interpretation. When Porter first arrives at what he soon 

renames the “Washington Islands,” he glosses over the possibility of misunderstanding or 

                                                 
5
 In the interest of consistency, I will adopt Melville’s spellings of Marquesan names. 



 

120 

misinterpretation. He says of the natives, “They frequently repeated to us the word taya, 

which signifies friend, and invited us to shore, where they assured us, by the most 

expressive gesticulations, that the vahienas, or women, were entirely at our service” (II: 

10). Both native terms in this passage are immediately translated into English, and even 

the Marquesans’ gestures are said to be instantly understood. Whatever the accuracy of 

these translations, they clearly ignore any cultural differences that might complicate 

Porter’s instantaneous, word-for-word translation, such as the island’s specific codes of 

friendship or the class of women that “vahienas” might indicate. At the same time, 

Porter’s interpretation of the Marquesans’ meaning optimistically expects that the natives 

will bow down before the advance of civilization. A similar minimization of cultural 

difference can be observed in Porter’s brief discussion of the complicated cultural code of 

the taboo, which Typee will examine in depth. When Porter writes, “The word taboo 

signifies an interdiction, an embargo, or restraint; and the restrictions during the period of 

their existence may be compared to the lent of the catholics” (II: 42), he easily translates 

the term while equating it to a known Western standard. In all of these examples, the act 

of translation is ignored or erased. 

Porter’s general disregard for the difficulties of cross-cultural communication and 

understanding is facilitated by Wilson, a white beachcomber figure “gone native” who 

acts as the captain’s interpreter. Porter explains: 

His knowledge of the people, and the ease with which he spoke their 

language, removed all difficulties in our intercourse with them; and it must 

be understood, in all relations of future interviews and conversations, 

which took place between me and the natives, that Wilson is the organ of 

communication and the means by which we are enabled to understand 

each other: I shall, therefore, in future, deem it unnecessary to say, I was 

assisted by an interpreter, it must always be understood that I had one. (II: 

21) 



 

121 

It is likely that Wilson’s understanding of the people and their language surpassed that of 

Porter, but Porter’s assertion that Wilson “removed all difficulties” of communication 

seems both too extreme to be entirely accurate and also too indicative of the imperialist 

ideology described by Cheyfitz to be taken at face value. In any case, by letting his 

translator remain “invisible,” to use Lawrence Venuti’s terminology, Porter downplays 

the significance of cross-cultural interpretation and understanding, falling short of 

Melville’s far more nuanced depiction of linguistic encounter. 

Stewart also minimizes the acts of translation and interpretation. Even more than 

in Porter, the language difference between missionaries and Pacific Islanders remains 

invisible and unproblematic. One rare instance where interpretation is discussed at all is 

Stewart’s description of a “Worship Ceremony at Hido” observed during his visit to 

Hawaii. After noting, “I had not, in my long absence, so entirely forgotten the native 

language, as not to understand much that was said,” Stewart presents the speech of the 

congregation rendered in English (II: 77). The discussion that follows indicates how 

Stewart derives a theory of seamless translation from his religious convictions: 

Could I be deceived in the interpretation of this case? Could I be mistaken 

in the causes and the nature of those varied emotions, under the 

circumstances in which they were beheld; and in one, of whom I had never 

heard, and whom I had never before seen? No I could not: and if so—what 

is the language they speak? They plainly say that this poor woman, grown 

gray in the ignorance and varied degradation of heathenism . . . sees 

herself to be a sinner . . . . The simple appearance and every deportment of 

that obscure congregation, whom I had once known, and at no remote 

period, only as a set of rude, licentious, and wild pagans, did more to rivet 

the conviction of the divine origin of the Bible, and of the holy influences 

by which it is accompanied to the hearts of men, than all the arguments, 

and apologies, and defences [sic] of Christianity I ever read. (II: 76-77) 

Despite his admittedly limited understanding of native Hawaiian, Stewart presents a fluid 

translation into English. He then follows this seemingly unproblematic translation with 



 

122 

exclamations over the unambiguous language of Calvinist conversion. Because he 

believes his own religion to be universal truth, he has absolute faith in the accuracy of his 

interpretation of the Hawaiians’ religious convictions. This is a perfect example of the 

imperialist’s belief that “everything can be translated into his terms” (Cheyfitz, Poetics 

195). More provocatively, when Stewart references the “divine origin of the Bible,” he 

recalls the universalizing, monologic voice of God. Such an ideal of unified, prelapsarian 

speech is the religious analogue of the transcendentalist idea that language represents 

universal truth, a view which Melville will critique throughout his career. 

Stewart is driven by science as well as religion, and the unproblematic 

universality he attributes to the language of conversion is mirrored in his incorporation of 

scientific discourse, particularly his use of Latin names to indicate the plants he 

encounters throughout the Pacific. His emphasis on the names of concrete and easily 

classifiable flora skews his treatment of language to emphasize cases where words are a 

clearer index of reality, where language most closely takes the form of Adamic naming. 

One of the many possible examples demonstrates the capacity of Latin names to conceal 

linguistic uncertainty. Stewart describes “a few small trees of ironwood (casuarina), here 

called koa” (I: 256). This immediate and unproblematic translation between three 

languages subtly suggests that all translation will be just as clear-cut. Of course, 

translation does seem easier when the referent is a physical object, but as Todorov’s 

analysis of the Columbus journals has demonstrated, an unbalanced reliance on the 

names of things, on “that sector of language which serves . . . only to designate nature,” 

can mask deeper misunderstanding (Todorov 28-29). Stewart’s use of scientific 

terminology is also an example of what Mary Louise Pratt calls “planetary 



 

123 

consciousness,” which includes “the construction of global-scale meaning through the 

descriptive apparatuses of natural history,” as when Linnaeus uses “Latin for his 

nomenclature precisely because it was nobody’s national language,” demonstrating “the 

continental, transnational aspirations of European science” (15, 25). Pratt argues that such 

“systematization of nature coincides with the height of the slave trade, the plantation 

system, [and] colonial genocide in North America and South Africa” (36). Through 

science as well as language and religion, then, Stewart universalizes and systematizes 

Western modes of “truth,” thereby justifying the analogous “systematization of human 

life” that grounds the atrocities of colonialism and imperialism (36). Conversely, when 

Melville’s problematization of translation and cross-cultural exchange reveals the lack of 

a universal, monologic truth, he undercuts these colonial systems. The following reading 

of Melville’s early, Pacific novels will focus on Melville’s decentering of colonial 

discourse in scenes of linguistic encounter. 

Typee and the Perils of Cross-Cultural Communication 

In Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Melville demonstrates a thorough 

engagement with the tradition of colonial language encounter. As its subtitle suggests, 

Typee was originally marketed as an account of Melville’s own experiences on 

Nukuhiva, although some readers were always skeptical of the truth of his narrative. It 

has been long established that Melville’s supposed four-month stay on the island could 

have lasted no more than four weeks (C. Anderson 70). Robert C. Suggs finds factual 

errors and impossibilities in Melville’s account of Nukuhiva and argues, “whatever 

realistic elements there are in Typee, it remains first and foremost a literary romance” 

(83). Still, as Typee is the only source of information about Melville’s experiences in the 



 

124 

Marquesas available to scholars, the temptation remains to read it as autobiography 

(Heflin 137; Kelley, Herman 5).
6
 In the present study, however, it is useful to distinguish 

between the realism of Melville’s account and its literal truth. The first relates to the 

question of Melville’s engagement with issues of colonialism and race, the second, 

though integral to works of biography, is of less value here. 

It is beyond doubt that the encounter between white Americans and exotic Pacific 

Islanders is a central concern of Typee, but Melville’s position on the issues of 

colonialism and imperialism raised by such an encounter is a subject of much debate (G. 

Thompson 19).
7
 My reading of native language in Typee will follow those who focus on 

                                                 
6
 The question of truthfulness or accuracy also affects Typee’s classification as a 

travelogue or novel. Janet Giltrow (18), Robert K. Martin (19), and James Jubak (133) all 

emphasize the importance of reading Typee as a travel narrative. Geoffrey Sanborn insists 

that, whether the work is “a reliable record of travel or an unreliable record of 

adventures[,] . . . Melville’s foregrounding of that question does not transform the book 

from a travel narrative into a novel” (“Purple” 132). Wyn Kelley describes Typee as an 

ingenious combination of genres including “travel account, captivity narrative, 

anthropological study, escapist fantasy, [and] maritime yarn” (Herman 28-29). Indeed, 

those who argue that Typee is more than a travelogue seem to differ only in their 

judgment of how much philosophical errancy the genre can contain (see Springer and 

Robillard 128; Maloney 17; Dimock 38).  

7
 Many readings, particularly early ones, have viewed Typee as either “a whole-hearted 

defense of the Noble Savage” (C. Anderson 178; also see Wenke 252), or what Sanborn 

calls “a humanistic recognition of the identity of self and other” (Sign 134; see Herbert 

172; Firebaugh 115). Others approach the issue of savagery more critically and directly: 

Anna Krauthammer argues that “Melville . . . uses the white savage motif in an 

examination of the dichotomy between savagism and civilization as it applies to non-

white others in the South Seas” (28). Mitchell Breitwieser argues that, when Tommo’s 

“rhetorical primitive encounters the actual primitive[,] . . . Tommo’s narrative falls into a 

bewildered vacillation between portraits of the Typees as nobly innocent victims of 

colonialism and portraits of them as happy perpetrators of an appalling depravity” (398). 

Not surprisingly, more recent critics have read such primitivism as complicit in colonial 

stereotypes (Banerjee 212; J. Edwards 32; Ka‘imipono Kaiwi; Kelleter 200; Maddox 58; 

S. Thomson 61-69). As Charlene Avallone righty argues, “Too often critical claims 

assume Melville’s humanistic or anticolonial intent without the support of convincing 

textual or biographical evidence” (44). On the other hand, many critics have read Typee 



 

125 

the unknowability of the exotic other in Melville’s portrayal of encounter.
8
 Like Cooper 

in Mercedes of Castile, Melville does the most justice to Typee culture when he portrays 

the difficulties of both linguistic and cultural translation. The following reading will 

argue that Melville demonstrates a pervasive engagement with the difficulties of cross-

cultural communication encountered by an American in the Pacific, that he critiques the 

depictions of language in his imperialist sources, and that he begins to explore the ways 

                                                                                                                                                 

as a decidedly anticolonial text (Robertson-Lorant 11; Greenberg 10; Grejda 23-26; 

Milder 11; D. Berthold 59; Otter, Melville’s 10; Ivison 115-16; Kardux 270). Others, 

including John Carlos Rowe (“Melville’s”), Nicholas Lawrence, and Robert Roripaugh, 

have connected Typee to domestic concerns like slavery or the Western frontier. The 

most persuasive arguments, however, recognize that, despite Melville’s clear objection to 

the injustices of both American and European imperialism, his anticolonialism is limited 

both ideologically, by the unavoidable prejudices of his age, and economically, by the 

desires and demands of his readership (Sanborn, Sign 77, 122; Sanborn, “Motive” 368; P. 

West 142). Likewise, Christopher McBride (“Americans” 165; Colonizer 12), Jeffrey 

Hotz (Divergent 250, 256), and Malini Johar Schueller have all noted that Melville 

simultaneously questions and enacts colonialist, imperialist, and racist discourse. 

8
 For example, Rowe argues that “Typee rejects the prevailing ethnographic models of its 

time” by “destabiliz[ing] our very processes of understanding other peoples” (Literary 

80). Likewise, Bruce A. Harvey argues that, “in Typee, the natives will be most real when 

they are least understood” (62). A number of critics also focus on the centrality of 

moments of encounter. T. Walter Herbert, Jr., contends that Melville “shifts the 

emphasis” from the travel writings of missionaries and other travelers “so that it rests 

upon the encounter, the experience of contact, rather than upon the Marquesans as a thing 

observed” (158). Gibian argues that “Typee turns on the failure of contact between its 

narrator and the foreign world he travels through, a failure based in the narrator’s 

continued attachment to the conventional thinking of his home culture” (23). According 

to John Evelev, “The object of representation of Typee is, above all, primitivism: the 

encounter of civilization with the exotic primitive” (19). Lyons examines how “Melville 

begins in Typee to refigure the multiple fears brought about by intercultural encounter—

fears about boundaries, or, rather, their porousness” (American 78). David Farrier argues 

that “Typee is concerned less with writing encounter as with defining it,” and he 

describes how the narrative “plays with operations of difference, drawing parallels 

between apparently diverse cultures and offering unsettling conclusions” (8, 117). Ian S. 

Maloney examines the representation of monuments in Typee, arguing that “contact with 

memorials emphasizes the space and distance between cultures” (17). 



 

126 

translation exposes the inherent inadequacy of all language, a theory he will continue to 

elaborate throughout his career. 

 

Although Melville’s engagement with the experience of being immersed in an 

exotic and unknown language is a major focus of the novel, the seriousness with which 

Melville treats foreign language has long been concealed by the tradition of mistrusting 

his Polynesian. In his travelogue In the South Seas, Robert Louis Stevenson famously 

criticizes Melville’s bad ear. He calls Melville’s “Hapar” for “Hapaa” a “grotesque 

misspelling” and imagines that Melville was gifted with the abilities to “see,” “tell,” and 

“charm,” but that he was not “able to hear” (23).
9
 Despite Melville’s own claim in 

Typee’s preface to have transcribed Polynesian words in the “form of orthography . . . 

which might be supposed most easily to convey their sound to a stranger” (xiv), many 

critics have agreed with Stevenson’s negative assessment. For example, Suggs notes that 

Melville’s “Marquesan vocabulary includes many non-Marquesan or nonsense words” 

and that “his place names and tribal names are also often erroneous” (48-49). A few, 

however, have looked beyond the tradition of maligning Melville’s Polynesian. Elizabeth 

Renker quite persuasively argues that any shortcomings in Melville’s transliterations 

result from his poor spelling of standard English rather than from any inability to 

properly hear or speak Polynesian (5-7). In his study of a recently discovered section of 

the Typee manuscript, however, John Bryant traces editorial changes in Melville’s 

spelling of Polynesian words and finds that they “indicate (contra Stevenson) that 

                                                 
9
 See Vanessa Smith’s Literary Culture and the Pacific for a more detailed discussion of 

Stevenson’s comment (111). 



 

127 

[Melville] heard Polynesian well and initially transcribed the sounds with an informed 

(although not always consistent) sense of the conventional transliteration of Polynesian 

printed in Melville’s day” (Unfolding 193). Bryant also notes that “Typee exhibits a 

Polynesian and Hawaiian vocabulary of at least 102 words, names, and place-names, 

most of which are accompanied with translations” (241). 

One scholar in the field of linguistics has done even more to recover the value of 

Melville’s Polynesian. Emanuel J. Drechsel points out that the majority of the Typee 

language in the work could be classified as “Maritime Polynesian Pidgin,” which he 

defines as “a major linguistic compromise of the indigenous population with newcomers, 

who had willy-nilly attempted to learn indigenous languages, if only reluctantly and 

incompletely” (“Maritime Polynesian” 235-36). Unlike Pidgin English, which would 

commonly be considered “broken English,” Maritime Polynesian Pidgin is the “broken 

Polynesian” of sailors like Melville who attempted to speak the native language. This 

classification highlights Tommo’s capitulation to the language of his captors—his 

willingness to learn the native tongue instead of insisting that the natives, Squanto-like, 

must learn his own. Drechsel defends Melville’s use of this pidgin language and 

concludes, “In spite of their Anglophone spellings, Melville’s attestations of Maritime 

Polynesian Pidgin are reconstitutable by comparative evidence from Polynesian source 

languages, and deserve recognition for their accuracy” (253). Although I cannot claim 

Drechsel’s technical knowledge of the language Melville depicts, the following reading 

will demonstrate Melville’s interest in what actually happens when a white, European-

language speaker is immersed in an exotic language and culture. Whatever Typee’s 

relation to Melville’s own experiences on Nukuhiva, and despite the inevitable 



 

128 

limitations of his Polynesian, Melville’s portrayal of linguistic encounter counteracts 

stereotypical portrayals of exotic languages by enabling readers to understand the lived 

experience of fraught cross-cultural communication.
10

 

Melville’s attention to language is also part of a larger engagement with previous 

narratives of exploration and encounter. Like Columbus, Tommo initially views Typee 

valley as a kind of Eden, but as Milton R. Stern observes in his examination of Melville’s 

“struggle with the possibility that multiple signification is the product of a fallen world,” 

“Tommo’s language fail[s] him as society turn[s] out to be something other than he had 

foreseen in his expectations of paradise” (444, 452). Thus, while Melville does 

occasionally depict Typee valley as a kind of paradise, he does not repeat the mistakes of 

earlier explorers and assume that the seemingly innocent and childlike natives living 

there will share a universal language and culture with their colonizers. Instead, Melville 

                                                 
10

 Indeed, this is not the first study to call attention to the importance of language in 

Typee. Farrier analyzes Pacific missionaries’ difficulty with Polynesian language and 

argues that the Typees in Melville’s work deliberately “use ambiguity to deflect attention 

away from the centre of Typee culture” thereby “preventing their textualization by 

another culture by maintaining their status as fundamentally ambiguous in all modes of 

discourse” (85-86, 120). Michael C. Berthold argues that the Typee language “force[s] 

upon Tommo [a] new, unsettling knowledge of the fluidity of speech” (“Portentous” 555-

56). Hans-Georg Erney has asserted that “the crucial battleground on which Typee is 

fought is that of language” (144), but his primary focus is on how Melville/Tommo uses 

the English language to make sense of his experiences. Finally, with a focus most closely 

related to my own, Herbert notes how “Melville’s gift for language . . . enables Melville 

to convey impressions of the ways in which various schemes of interpretation make 

sense, make nonsense, and wreak havoc in Polynesia” (159). In contrast, Winston 

Weathers’s reading of “communication problems” in Typee demonstrates exactly the 

prejudiced denigration of supposedly “savage” language that Melville critiques. Weathers 

contends: “A second obstacle to communication is a far too heavy reliance upon 

subverbal and non-lexical media among the natives. On the verbal level, the Typee 

language is essentially a matter of ‘chatter, chatter, chatter’ . . . . Like babies and 

children, the Typees communicate by signs . . . . Even if Tommo were to learn the Typee 

language thoroughly, he would be faced with the problem of a language inadequate for 

communication” (74). 



 

129 

critiques the typical narrative of encounter by highlighting the inherent 

incommensurability of translation.  

From the first encounter between the runaway sailors and two native children, 

Melville is careful to distinguish his narrative from the prototypical scenes of conquest he 

evokes. Tommo recalls, “I then uttered a few words of their language with which I was 

acquainted, scarcely expecting that they would understand me, but to show that we had 

not dropped from the clouds upon them” (68). Melville separates Tommo from figures 

like Columbus or Cortés in that Tommo does not want to give the impression that the 

white men are some kind of gods. Likewise, the Typees are not merely perceived as 

childlike, as in the typical narrative of encounter—they are actual children. Indeed, as the 

Typees lead the Americans back to their valley, Melville makes it clear that he is not 

interested in simply reproducing the norms of the linguistic encounters depicted in his 

sources. Although it first appears that the two Typee children do not understand the white 

men, it quickly becomes obvious that they are deliberately feigning ignorance. Tommo 

describes how, in response to his repetition of “Typee” and “Happar”:  

They repeated the words after me again and again, but without giving any 

peculiar emphasis to either, so that I was completely at a loss to 

understand them; for a couple of wilier young things than we afterwards 

found them to have been on this particular occasion never probably fell in 

any traveller’s way. (69) 

The native children pretend not to understand Tommo’s questions in order to trick the 

men into following them back to their village. By giving the Typees such agency, 

Melville plays with the stereotypical encounter of mutual incomprehension.  



 

130 

The pivotal moment when Tommo discovers that Marnoo understands English 

further demonstrates Melville’s engagement with the complex multilingualism of 

Nukuhiva: 

[A]s soon as our palms met, he bent towards me, and murmured in 

musical accents,—“How you do?” How long you been in this bay?” “You 

like this bay?” 

Had I been pierced simultaneously by three Happar spears, I could not 

have started more than I did at hearing these simple questions! (139) 

Tommo describes Marnoo’s speech as “musical accents” and “simple questions,” but he 

does not find it necessary to specify that Marnoo is speaking in English, which is the 

reason for Tommo’s happy surprise. In many works of linguistic encounter, as in 

Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, dialogue meant to be spoken in native languages is 

written in English for the reader’s benefit. This practice would have made it necessary to 

indicate, in contrast to previous “translations,” that these were Marnoo’s exact words in 

English. That Melville does not use such a marker highlights the fact that all previous 

speech either has been transcribed in its proper language, paraphrased, or presented with 

a translation in parentheses.
11

 By thus representing the true multilingualism of Typee 

valley, Melville avoids the seamless and silent translations that characterize more 

stereotypical literature of encounter. Just as Tommo constantly would be faced with his 

unsettlingly limited knowledge of Polynesian, Melville does not let the reader forget that 

the Typees’ speech and actions are never immediately comprehensible. At the same time, 

by including a character who does speak English, Melville avoids the opposite extreme of 

                                                 
11

 Analysis of such a scene is greatly aided by Rosenwald’s framework for classifying the 

representation of multilingualism (1-3; also see my Introduction). Tagging dialogue with 

the language in which it is spoken is a way to “translate” all foreign language for the 

reader without completely effacing the multilingual reality the author means to depict. 



 

131 

total incomprehensibility, demonstrating that some cross-cultural communication is 

already occurring in the contact zone between whites and Polynesians.  

The nuance in Melville’s depiction of fraught communication is perhaps best 

demonstrated by the vastly different impressions previous critics have had of how well 

Tommo can understand the Typees’ speech.
12

 Closer attention demonstrates, however, 

that Tommo’s level of understanding is neither falsely asserted by himself nor 

unrealistically depicted by Melville. Readings of Tommo’s level of proficiency vary so 

widely only because Melville avoids the easily classifiable extremes of seamless 

translation and irreconcilable difference. Because the Polynesian vocabulary presented in 

Typee is internally consistent, it is frequently possible for a reader to learn the meaning of 

a word such as “mortarkee” and then use that understanding to interpret a later phrase. By 

thus initiating the reader into his own partial knowledge of Polynesian, Melville 

illustrates how Tommo uses his limited vocabulary to make rudimentary translations and 

acquire new Polynesian words. If, even without the benefit of immersion in the language, 

the reader can begin to understand simple statements, it is not impossible to imagine how 

Tommo might acquire the same understanding. At the same time, as common experience 

                                                 
12

 While Daneen Wardrop (148) and Jeffrey Hotz (Divergent 260) both suggest that 

Tommo understands the language little if at all, McBride asserts that any lack of 

comprehension is feigned (Colonizer 18; “I Saw” 26). Similarly, J. Kerry Grant notes that 

“Tommo’s deepest perplexity is rarely a function of his inability to understand the 

language of his captors” and that “[h]e very rapidly demonstrates his ability to 

communicate with the islanders at an effective if rudimentary level and in his ramblings 

about the valley he is not often hindered by the irritations of the ordinary tourist who has 

lost his phrasebook” (65). Far more skeptical of Tommo’s ability with Polynesian, Bryant 

asserts, “Real, imagined, or falsely asserted, [Tommo’s] linguistic proficiency is as 

baffling to us as Polynesian is baffling, and finally horrific, to him,” but he concludes that 

“Melville needed to establish that Marquesan is translatable enough for him to appreciate 

certain Marquesan moments but not enough to explain its horrors and allow him to stay” 

(“A Work” 91-92). 



 

132 

can easily show, there is a great difference between rudimentary understanding and 

fluency, and thus it is only reasonable that, of the Typees’ “thousand questions” that first 

night in the valley, Tommo and Toby “could understand nothing more than that they had 

reference to the recent movements of the French” and other occasional “indistinct idea[s] 

of their meaning” (75). Even as Tommo’s understanding of the language increases, 

Melville is still careful to distinguish between basic phrases such as “‘Happar poo 

arva!—Happar poo arva!’ (the cowards had fled),” which give Tommo little difficulty, 

and Kory-Kory’s “vehement harangue,” which Tommo can only paraphrase with the 

disclaimer, “so far as I understood it” (13). Tommo, like Melville, understands a limited 

amount of Polynesian from the combination of a whaler’s previous knowledge and his 

stay on Nukuhiva, but it would be wrong to extrapolate a total understanding from such 

basic phrases, as some critics would wish to do, or to assume, conversely, that a lack of 

total comprehension is evidence of no understanding at all. In contrast to his 

predecessors, Melville avoids the extremes of too-easy translation and utter 

incomprehensibility, presenting his reader with a depiction of cross-cultural encounter 

that is as credible as it is respectful of cultural difference. 

 

 Melville’s own experiences on Nukuhiva contribute a level of complexity and 

sophistication to the linguistic encounters in Typee, but Melville also responds to the 

stereotypical portrayals of “savage” language found in previous narratives. From the 

beginning of Typee, he critiques the traditional ethnographical practice of using language 

to denigrate a supposedly savage people. After using quotation marks to highlight and 

distinguish Polynesian words, Melville employs the same typographical markings to 



 

133 

imply a message of cultural relativism when he describes Porter’s violent actions and the 

islanders’ just retaliation: 

Thus it is that they whom we denominate “savages” are made to deserve 

the title. When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the 

“big canoe” of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their 

shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms ready 

to embrace the strangers. (26) 

By placing quotation marks around both “savages” and “big canoe,” and thus visually 

and typographically aligning the terms, Melville shows how labeling an unfamiliar 

culture “savage” is akin to the seemingly less proper application of “big canoe” to a ship 

likewise outside of the other culture’s comprehension. The inappropriateness or 

inadequacy of both terms derives from a lack of cross-cultural understanding. Melville’s 

following statement, “How often is the term ‘savages’ incorrectly applied” (27), which he 

borrows nearly verbatim from Porter’s insufficient defense of the Marquesans (Porter II: 

62), is proof of Melville’s desire to rewrite the most limited colonial perspectives.
13

 Not 

                                                 
13

 A similar sentiment is repeated much later in the book: “The term ‘Savage’ is, I 

conceive, often misapplied” (125). However, as Bryant suggests in his analysis of the 

relative frequency with which the terms “savage,” “islander,” and “native” occur in 

Typee, such apparent anticolonialism has its limits, and “Melville is reserving the use of 

savage, despite his own advanced ideology, for the shock the word will induce in 

readers” (Unfolding 167-68). Bryant expresses Melville’s ambivalent anticolonialism 

more broadly when he concludes from his analysis of Melville’s revision: “But the 

deeper irony of his revisions is that while Melville was revising his text, on the one hand, 

to assert his personal, imperial dominance over the various colonized sexual identities he 

projected onto Typee, he was also revising, on the other hand, so as to castigate 

imperialism in the Pacific, and in particular his imperialistic predecessors” (Unfolding 

60). Hotz offers another reading of Melville’s use of “savage” when he argues: “The 

slippery connotations of ‘savage’ throughout the narrative reflect Tommo’s ironic stance 

toward the Typees. The ironic voice of the narrator perhaps masks his uncertainties in 

addressing what he sees as the conceptual problem posed by the Typees: the incongruities 

in their not being conventionally ‘savage’ and yet the burden of writing an adventure 

narrative that would appeal to a wide readership with this very notion of ‘savage’” 

(Divergent 258). 



 

134 

only does the conjunction of “savage” with “big canoe” reinforce a message of cultural 

relativism, but it also demonstrates a link between Melville’s critique of ethnographic 

prejudice and his engagement with issues of how language contains and communicates 

meaning. 

Melville also critiques the use of linguistic ethnography to label other 

languages—and thus other cultures—as inferior. He writes: 

I once heard it given as an instance of the frightful depravity of a certain 

tribe in the Pacific, that they had no word in their language to express the 

idea of virtue. The assertion was unfounded; but were it otherwise, it 

might be met by stating that their language is almost entirely destitute of 

terms to express the delightful ideas conveyed by our endless catalogue of 

civilized crimes. (126) 

Melville criticizes such linguistic prejudice on two levels. On the one hand, by rejecting 

the tribe’s supposed lack of vocabulary, he suggests that such claims are often fabricated 

to serve an ideological purpose. At the same time, Melville points out how ostensibly true 

statements can be equally deceptive when they reveal only one side of the issue. For 

example, a popular bit of trivia asserts that the Inuit have many words for snow. While 

their language does have a significant number, linguists have demonstrated that English 

contains just as many.
14

 Though presented as science, such linguistic trivia more often 

distort the truth than reveal it. 

Despite the potential for superficiality in Melville’s literal denunciations of 

colonialism, he makes a deeper critique of the classification of “savageness” in his 

depiction of non-verbal communication. At first glance, however, Melville seems to echo 

                                                 
14

 For proof of this, see Anthony C. Woodbury’s “Counting Eskimo Words for Snow: A 

Citizen’s Guide.” 



 

135 

the presentation of gesture in his sources. The following anecdote, for example, contains 

many elements of the typical imperialist language encounter: 

The natives of Nukuheva would frequently recount in pantomime to our 

ship’s company [the Typees’] terrible feats . . . . It was quite amusing, too, 

to see with what earnestness they disclaimed all cannibal propensities on 

their own part, while they denounced their enemies—the Typees—as 

inveterate gormandizers of human flesh[.] (25) 

As in earlier accounts, the whalers and Nukuhevans resort to gesture to communicate in 

the absence of a mutual language. This passage is also reminiscent of the origin of the 

term “cannibal.” As with the Caribs and the Arawaks, the white men only hear about the 

cannibalism of the Typees from their enemies.
15

 Unlike his predecessors, however, 

Melville makes it clear that the information received from these pantomimed accounts is 

doubly doubtful, first, because it is communicated in the imperfect medium of gesture, 

and, second, because it comes from the biased perspective of a situation of mutual 

enmity, us vs. them.  

Toby’s attempts to communicate with the two Typee children using gesture 

further question the possibility of cross-cultural communication in the absence of a 

shared language: 

The frightened pair now stood still, whilst we endeavored to make them 

comprehend the nature of our wants. In doing this Toby went through with 

a complete series of pantomimic illustrations—opening his mouth from 

ear to ear, and thrusting his fingers down his throat, gnashing his teeth and 

rolling his eyes about, till I verily believe the poor creatures took us for a 

couple of white cannibals who were about to make a meal of them. (69) 

                                                 
15

 Samuel Otter has similarly pointed out that the repetition of “Typee or Happar?” 

“echoes the founding European trope of colonial encounter in the Caribbean: Carib or 

Arawak? Fierce cannibal or noble savage?” (Melville’s 11). Alex Calder also has argued 

that Typee “is now generally thought to unravel the binary [of “cannibal or friend”]. 

Neither version of Polynesia is at all adequate to the reality of Tommo’s experience” 

(“Pacific” 99). 



 

136 

This scene recalls an extremely similar one in Cooper’s Homeward Bound, in which a 

white character fails to communicate his good intentions to a captured Arab (see Chapter 

Two). In Homeward Bound, the white man’s gestures “described, with sufficient 

clearness, the process of skinning, cutting up, cooking, and eating the carcass of the Arab, 

with the humane intention of throwing a negative over the whole proceeding, by a strong 

sign of dissent at the close,” but the gestures have the reverse effect and convince the 

captive that he is about to be cooked and eaten (II: 16). Likewise, Toby’s attempts at non-

verbal communication show how easily an intended meaning can be reversed. And it is 

the American character who is the butt of the joke, not the racial Others with whom he is 

attempting to communicate. Similarly, during Mehevi’s inspection of Tommo’s 

mysteriously afflicted leg, Tommo describes how Toby, “throwing himself into all the 

attitudes of a posture-master, vainly endeavored to expostulate with the natives by signs 

and gestures” (80). Comically exaggerating Toby’s ridiculousness, Tommo even remarks, 

“one would have thought that he was the deaf and dumb alphabet incarnated” (80). These 

passages exemplify Toby’s mode of communication with the Typees. In addition to their 

comedic value, such scenes balance similarly comic descriptions of the Typees’ 

communication by making a white character equally laughable, a fact that is too often 

overlooked by those who most harshly criticize Melville’s portrayal of native 

Marquesans.  

Thus, Toby’s comic gesturing balances a scene that appears to mock Kory-Kory’s 

speech, a passage which Bryant analyzes in Melville’s manuscript of Typee. Even in the 

final version, the native’s “harangue” gives Tommo “the headache for the rest of the day” 

(Melville, Typee 103), but Bryant describes how “in manuscript Melville derides Kory-



 

137 

Kory’s ‘eloquence,’ stating that the native would have used the standard rhetorical 

signposts (firstly, secondly, etc.) ‘had he been anything other than the illiterate barbarian 

that he was’” (Repose 154).
16

 Comparing this scene with the above descriptions of Toby, 

however, reveals that what is notable about such comical linguistic displays is not that 

they are given by a “savage,” but rather that they are attempts to make oneself understood 

to a foreigner. For example, when Kory-Kory first attempts to inform Tommo that he is 

to be the invalid’s mode of transportation, Tommo describes how “Kory-Kory, leaping 

from the pi-pi, and then backing himself up against it, like a porter in readiness to 

shoulder a trunk, with loud vociferations and a superabundance of gestures, gave me to 

understand that I was to mount upon his back” (89). It would be easy to read this 

behavior as a bit of endearingly childish and savage silliness, but in comparison to 

Toby’s similar displays, it becomes clear that Kory-Kory is only gesturing so comically 

because Tommo would not understand if he spoke normally.  

In the very scene that Bryant describes, in which Kory-Kory lectures Tommo 

about the depravity of the Happars, Melville also makes it patently clear that the 

extremity of Kory-Kory’s behavior is motivated by his desire to be understood: 

Kory-Kory seemed to experience so heartfelt a desire to infuse into our 

minds proper views on these subjects, that, assisted in his endeavors by the 

little knowledge of the language we had acquired, he actually succeeded in 

making us comprehend a considerable part of what he said. . . . [H]e 

explained himself by a variety of gestures, during the performance of 

which he would dart out of the house, and point abhorrently towards the 

                                                 
16

 Bryant concludes from Melville’s deletion of a passage that “further mocks Kory-

Kory’s ‘gibberish’” that, “[i]n toning down the burlesque, Melville preserves our growing 

regard for the island culture” (Repose 155). Corroborating my own emphasis on 

language, Bryant further argues, “If these ‘amiable epicures’ are worth emulating socially 

and morally, then their language merits serious attention. It deserves objective translation, 

not ridicule” (155). 



 

138 

Happar valley; running in to us again and with a rapidity that showed he 

was fearful we would lose one part of his meaning before he could 

complete the other; and continuing his illustrations by seizing the fleshy 

part of my arm in his teeth, intimating by the operation that the people 

who lived over in that direction would like nothing better than to treat me 

in that manner. (102-103) 

Undoubtedly, this method of communication is comically ridiculous, but I would argue 

that, in light of the example of Toby and the similar scenes in Cooper, the genre of Kory-

Kory’s performance is not “savage inability to communicate in a civilized manner” but 

“the lengths a person of any race will go to be understood by someone who speaks a 

different language.” As Bryant points out, Tommo is quick to judge Kory-Kory for the 

excessive heavy-handedness of his gestures, but the earlier examples of Toby’s failed 

pantomimes demonstrate that Tommo is wrong in assuming non-verbal communication 

to be so transparent that less elaborate gesturing would suffice. In light of this 

shortsightedness, it would appear that Tommo is far from an authorial mouthpiece when 

he goes on to mock Kory-Kory’s headache-inducing “strain of unintelligible and stunning 

gibberish” (103). After all, it is Tommo who does not fully understand the language, and 

if Kory-Kory’s “harangue” were not so unintelligible to a foreigner, his ludicrous display 

of gestures would not have been necessary. 

In contrast, the positive example of “native oratory” that Tommo finds in Marnoo 

differs from Kory-Kory’s “harangue” in that its audience are the Typees themselves, not 

foreigners who can understand only rudimentary Polynesian. Tommo states, “Little as I 

understood the language, yet from his animated gestures and the varying expression of 

his features—reflected as from so many mirrors in the countenances around him, I could 

easily discover the nature of those passions which he sought to arouse” (137). At first this 

scene might seem to mirror Stewart’s worship ceremony, but Tommo does not presume 



 

139 

to translate Marnoo’s speech into English. Tommo goes on to explain how he can 

understand part of the address from some familiar words, but not all of it. That Marnoo’s 

gestures, though “animated,” are far from comical, demonstrates what was earlier 

implied: the Typee language and mode of communication is neither puerile nor primitive, 

but any attempt to communicate across a language barrier easily can become ridiculous. 

Melville further connects the example of Marnoo’s speech to Kory-Kory’s diatribe by 

calling it a “vehement harangue” (138), but Tommo still remains unqualifiedly positive 

about Marnoo’s skill and eloquence.
17

 Thus, Melville uses the example of Marnoo, in 

contrast to the ridiculous gesturing and enunciation of both Toby and Kory-Kory, to 

highlight the difference between attempts to make oneself understood to a foreigner and 

monolingual communication. 

 

Melville’s depiction of foreign language encounters in Typee introduces the 

problems of linguistic and cultural translation that will concern him throughout his 

career. Like Cooper in Mercedes of Castile, Melville also uses such encounters to 

highlight the importance of recognizing cultural difference. Although Tommo seems to 

understand some cultural practices with ease while others remain mysterious, I disagree 

with those who read this variation as an inconsistent portrayal of Tommo’s knowledge of 

the Typee language.
18

 Many of Typee’s ethnographic descriptions consist of details that 

                                                 
17

 Bryant (Repose 184) and Gibian (26) have both read Marnoo as not only a positive but 

also a decidedly cosmopolitan character. 

18
 Bryant, for example, has asserted that “Tommo plays fast and loose with the language, 

choosing to know it and not know it to fit his rhetorical needs,” because “Melville needed 

to establish that Marquesan is translatable enough for him to appreciate certain 



 

140 

could be gleaned from careful observation and clarified with basic vocabulary. A total 

understanding of the Typee language would not be necessary, for example, to explain 

how a bundle of tappa is “laid in the bed of some running stream, with a heavy stone 

placed over it, to prevent its being swept away” (47). In the cases of more complex 

cultural concepts, however, Tommo does not claim as thorough an understanding as 

when he describes the physical customs of dress or food. When Kory-Kory shows 

Tommo a “remarkable pyramidical structure” in the Taboo Groves, Tommo admits he 

can offer the reader no explanation of the monument (160). He writes, “My cicerone 

perceived the astonishment with which I gazed at this monument of savage crockery, and 

immediately addressed himself to the task of enlightening me: but all in vain; and to this 

hour the nature of the monument remains a complete mystery to me” (160). Tommo’s 

dramatic and humorous tone, developed from Melville’s own entertaining stories of his 

adventures abroad, does not refrain from poking fun at the outlandishness of this “savage 

crockery.” Still, while Melville’s depiction of the Typees is not free from prejudice and 

does not shy away from comic deprecation, it is a testament to his open-mindedness that 

he does not presume to understand their culture at a glance but confesses when some 

practice remains a mystery, when communication proves impossible.  

Likewise, Tommo says of the tattoo, “Although convinced that tattooing was a 

religious observance, still the nature of the connection between it and the superstitious 

idolatry of the people was a point upon which I could never obtain any information. Like 

the still more important system of the ‘Taboo,’ it always appeared inexplicable to me” 

                                                                                                                                                 

Marquesan moments but not so translatable that Marquesan horrors might be explained 

away” (Unfolding 242). 



 

141 

(221). Once again, the disapproval implied in “superstitious idolatry”—and the 

possibility of being tattooed is one area where even Melville’s most ardent apologists 

admit that Tommo balks from full acceptance of the island’s culture—is undercut by 

Tommo’s admission that he has not been able to obtain sufficient information about the 

practice. As with the “Taboo,” the otherness of which is clearly marked by its 

capitalization and enclosure in quotation marks, the rationale of the Typees’ tattoos will 

not translate. Thus Melville does not fall into the common trap of imposing his own 

explanations onto the Typees. He does not, like Porter, claim the “taboo” is somehow 

equivalent to lent. Insistence on the utter unknowability of the Other would be prejudice 

of the opposite extreme, but at the early point of contact represented in Typee, true 

understanding of such complex cultural beliefs and practices is impossible. By admitting 

when something is incomprehensible, Tommo/Melville recognizes the barrier to easy 

translation imposed by cultural difference.  

 

Melville also begins in Typee to examine the importance of the act of translation 

itself. In his discussion of Kory-Kory’s harangue, Bryant calls attention to a textual crux 

that represents the heart of this issue. Melville writes that he will give either a “literal” or 

a “liberal” interpretation of Kory-Kory’s speech, but the narrator’s handwriting makes it 

impossible to determine which he intended (Bryant, Repose 155). The word appears as 

“literally” in both British and American first editions, but “liberally” in the Revised 

American edition, and it is impossible to know for certain whether “liberally” is a 

correction back to Melville’s original intention, Melville’s deliberate revision, or a 

misprint of what should have been “literally” all along (156). Bryant argues in Melville 



 

142 

and Repose that “‘literally’ is the better word” (156). In the more recent Melville 

Unfolding, however, Bryant’s discussion of the crux becomes more nuanced: 

Not only are the two words virtual antonyms, especially in the context of 

linguistic translation, but the two uses of the “L-word” come at a moment 

of cultural ambivalence in the narrative metonymically represented by this 

very lexical conclusion. Does Tommo wish to treat Typeean language and 

culture with objectivity and anthropological respect? Then he would opt to 

interpret Kory-Kory “literally,” if such a thing could be done. Does 

Tommo wish to deride Typeean language and culture with comic 

expansions of alien-sounding words into loose linguistic parallels? Then 

he would opt to interpret Kory-Kory “liberally,” perhaps (of course) as 

only any translation can be performed. (182) 

Clearly, this ambiguity raises a question of cultural transference that gets to the heart of 

Melville’s treatment of linguistic encounter. Bryant gestures at the possibility that all 

translations must necessarily be “liberal,” but he does not fully explore the implications 

of such insight. This failure leads him to undervalue the potential significance of a claim 

to give a “liberal” translation and leads him to conclude, erroneously, that “literal” 

produces the more emancipatory reading. The analysis of cross-cultural communication 

in Typee, read in the context of the history of colonial linguistic encounter, works to 

debunk Bryant’s equation of attempting a “literal” translation and treating a foreign 

“language and culture with objectivity and anthropological respect.” Whatever word 

Melville intended, the idea that no translation can be purely “literal” is borne out by an 

examination of his treatment of translation in Typee. Melville follows Cooper in 

demonstrating that, in the absence of true fluency, it is often more respectful to allow a 

foreign culture the difference and complexity of not being so readily translatable. 

By tracing Melville’s other references to the act of translation in Typee, it 

becomes clear that, whatever word Melville intended at whatever stage of the writing 

process, he begins to demonstrate that a literally “literal” translation is indeed impossible. 



 

143 

Nevertheless, in order to convey his basic knowledge of Polynesian to the reader, 

Tommo/Melville must include some translations of Polynesian vocabulary. Often, this 

transference of meaning seems straightforward enough, as in “‘whihenies’ (young girls)” 

(14). During his initial encounter with the Typees, Tommo calls attention to the 

transference of meaning between languages that such translations entail when he 

explains, “I now threw together in the form a question the words ‘Happar’ and 

‘Mortarkee,’ the latter being equivalent to the word ‘good’” (69, emphasis added). 

Throughout the book, Melville is similarly meticulous in marking his translations, 

designating that a thing is “called by the natives a ‘pi-pi’” or “denominated in the 

language of the natives the ‘Ti’” (81, 92). In one case, Melville takes this fastidiousness 

to a comic extreme when he writes, “‘Marnoo pemi!’ which being interpreted, implied 

that an individual by the name of Marnoo was approaching” (135). This verbose 

deviation from the more common form of “native term” (English translation) calls 

attention to a process of interpretation that is neither instantaneous nor seamless. Such 

play with the act of translation makes Tommo/Melville seem far from optimistic about 

the ease of transferring meaning from the Typee language into English. 

In several footnotes, Melville is even more careful to explain the complex 

nuances of Polynesian terms, demonstrating that they are never exactly “equivalent” to 

their English translations. For example, in a footnote for the term “tabooed Kannaka” 

(another interpreter), Melville explains: 

The word “Kannaka” is at the present day universally used in the South 

Seas by Europeans to designate the Islanders. In the various dialects of the 

principal groups it is simply a sexual designation applied to the males; but 

it is now used by the natives in their intercourse with foreigners in the 

same sense in which the latter employ it. 



 

144 

A “Tabooed Kannaka” is an islander whose person has been made to a 

certain extent sacred by the operation of a singular custom hereafter to be 

explained. (74) 

By explaining how “Kannaka” is “used” by certain people to “designate” a particular 

thing, Melville calls attention to the practical function of words instead of attributing to 

them any kind of universal or inherent meaning. He further highlights the fluidity of 

meaning that makes any “literal” translation impossible when he notes how the natives 

adopted a new definition from the foreigners’ mistranslation. In the second paragraph, the 

phrases “to a certain extent sacred” and “singular custom” again demonstrate how there 

can be no literal, word-for-word translation of “tabooed Kannaka” because it has no strict 

English equivalent.  

Melville provides a similar footnoted explanation for the translation of “Arva 

Wai”: “I presume this might be translated into ‘Strong Waters.’ Arva is the name 

bestowed upon a root the properties of which are both inebriating and medicinal. ‘Wai’ is 

the Marquesan word for water” (153). While the translation of “wai” presents few 

difficulties (although making even this claim has led me to imagine the numerous cultural 

connotations and distinctions that might complicate the seemingly easy translation of 

“water,” such as bottled water, salt water, running water, ice, etc.), “arva,” which 

Melville translates as “strong” in the aggregate phrase, is not an equivalent adjective for 

“strong” at all, but rather a particularly strong medicinal herb. Taken together, such 

examples call attention to the process of translation while demonstrating that the 

transference of meaning from one language to another is rarely accomplished without 

complications. 



 

145 

A final example illustrates the difference between Melville’s treatment of 

translation and that of his predecessors. When Tommo visits the “effigy of a dead 

warrior” with Kory-Kory, Melville departs from his usual practice by translating a bit of 

supposedly Polynesian dialogue directly into English: 

“A very pleasant place,” Kory-Kory said it was; “but after all, not much 

pleasanter, he thought than Typee.” “Did he not then,” I asked him, “wish 

to accompany the warrior?” “Oh no: he was very happy where he was; but 

supposed that some time or other he would go in his own canoe.” (172-73) 

At first it might seem that this seamless translation (similar to those found in Cooper’s 

Leatherstocking Tales) deviates from Melville’s usual foregrounding of the difficulties of 

cross-cultural communication. However, Tommo quickly erases this impression of 

linguistic transparency with the following observations: 

Thus far, I think, I clearly comprehended Kory-Kory. But there was a 

singular expression he made use of at the time, enforced by as singular a 

gesture, the meaning of which I would have given much to penetrate. I am 

inclined to believe it must have been a proverb he uttered . . . . Could it 

have been then . . . he answered by saying something equivalent to our old 

adage—“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?” (173) 

Thus, Tommo’s initially clear comprehension is undercut by the possibility that Kory-

Kory’s remark is not meant “literally,” but that it is a proverb, a culturally situated 

statement whose literal meaning is, by definition, not its actual meaning. By referencing 

this well-known translation challenge, and by enacting its conventional solution of 

finding an “equivalent” proverb in the target language (“A bird in the hand . . .”), 

Melville once again highlights the process of translation, thereby reinforcing language 

encounter as a major theme of his work while questioning the reliability of cross-cultural 

communication. 



 

146 

Typee offers such a wide array of linguistic examples because it is centrally 

concerned with issues of cross-cultural exchange across a language barrier. While novels 

such as Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales use conventional devices to sidestep the 

difficulties of a multilingual environment, as when Cooper tags English dialogue as a 

“translation” of Delaware speech, Melville confronts such multilingualism directly. 

Although his knowledge of pidgin Polynesian is limited, Melville incorporates the words 

he does know directly into his work, and his representation of what speech Tommo could 

not have fully understood engages the reader in a credible scene of linguistic encounter. 

At the same time, Melville undercuts the stereotypical portrayals of savage language 

found in his sources while also examining and beginning to deconstruct the act of 

translation itself. This extensive treatment of linguistic encounter establishes a set of 

concerns that will reappear throughout Melville’s later works.  

Language and Translation in Omoo, Mardi, and Moby-Dick 

While issues of language and communication play some role throughout most of 

Melville’s literary career, the nature of his focus on language varies across his Pacific 

writings. Typee’s nuanced treatment of foreign language is rooted in Melville’s 

engagement with the genre of travel writing, and even at this early stage of his career, 

Melville already surpasses Cooper, not only in his recognition of cross-cultural 

communication’s difficulties, but also in the respect and attention he devotes to native 

language and customs. Melville’s next Pacific narrative, Omoo, presents a view of 

Polynesian language at a later stage of imperialism, continuing the emphasis on the limits 

of translation begun in Typee. Mardi and Moby-Dick also follow the experiences of 

whalers in the Pacific, but as Melville’s fiction becomes more figurative and 



 

147 

philosophical, so too does his treatment of language. The following section will look 

briefly at language in Omoo, Mardi, and parts of Moby-Dick before the focus shifts, in 

the final section of this chapter, to one of Melville’s most significant treatments of 

translation, “Benito Cereno.” 

At first glance, Omoo (1847) seems to present the same smattering of Polynesian 

words and phrases as Typee. Drechsel, however, notes a key difference between the 

speech of the Pacific Islanders in Melville’s first two works. While Drechsel praises 

Melville’s accurate presentation of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin in Typee, he finds that the 

majority of language in Omoo is “Pidgin English, spiked with Polynesian terms for color” 

(“Pidgin English” 59). Drechsel argues that Melville thus takes “literary license for 

dramatic effects” (59), a view which is seconded by Mary K. Edwards, who finds that 

“[d]ialect and pidgin, typical of the American humorist writing of the period, sharpen and 

illuminate Melville’s characterizations” (148). While this use of “broken English” 

appears on the surface to relegate its speakers to the position of low, comic figures, the 

shift from Polynesian to English pidgin is not a change from accuracy to literary effect, as 

previous critics have asserted. It is a change in focus from the beginnings of 

colonial/imperial encounter to a much later stage. Melville has been criticized for his 

anachronistic presentation of the Typees as a civilization yet untouched by white 

colonialism, but, as Alex Calder has argued, he thereby “deliberately introduces details 

that telescope the full history of the European encounter with the Pacific into a single 

adventure” (“Mapping” 118). Thus, the subject of Typee is the initial encounter between 

Westerners and a largely untouched civilization. The travels of the narrator of Omoo, 

however, occur along coasts already frequented by American and European whalers, 



 

148 

traders, and missionaries. A regular intercourse with the inhabitants of those islands has 

been well established, so, while some cultural misunderstandings still persist, pathways 

of basic communication already have been opened. 

Drechsel unintentionally suggests this historical reading of Melville’s shift to 

Pidgin English when he explains why he believes Maritime Polynesian Pidgin would 

have been the more accurate choice. Drechsel argues, “Sociolinguistically and politically, 

Pidgin English simply does not fit as a major medium in a Polynesian environment in 

which Europeans, especially English-speaking ones, had not yet consolidated their power 

over the indigenous population” (“Pidgin English” 61). If Melville stretched the truth in 

Typee to focus on the beginnings of colonial encounter, it is no surprise that Omoo 

stretches the truth in the other direction to demonstrate the eventual consequences of 

imperialism. Indeed, when Melville describes the Tahitians as “mournfully watching their 

doom,” “all that is corrupt in barbarism and civilization unite,” and, “like other 

uncivilized beings, brought into contact with Europeans, . . . [remaining] stationary until 

utterly extinct,” he clearly indicates this final stage of colonial contact (192).
19

 In Omoo 

as in Typee, Melville uses language to characterize the trajectory of imperial encounter in 

the Pacific. 

Calder’s reading of the shift from Typee to Omoo further addresses both the 

changing representation of foreign language in Melville’s works and the changing nature 

of American travel. Calder argues, “When Typee’s narrator-as-anthropologist becomes 

                                                 
19

 Bryan Short has also found that rarely in Omoo does “language [form] a significant 

barrier to understanding,” and he offers the similar explanation that, “[b]ecause the 

intentions of Typee and Long Ghost, and indeed of Euro-American culture in Polynesia, 

are rudimentary and exploitative, the natives understand and anticipate their desires at 

every turn. Not much linguistic sophistication is called for” (“Plagiarizing” 103). 



 

149 

Omoo’s narrator-as-tourist, the problem is no longer ‘too many signs I can’t read’ but ‘so 

many signs that seem familiar’” (“Pacific” 107). Thus, Typee represents not only an early 

stage of colonialism but also an early stage of travel. Like Cooper and the other American 

travelers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Tommo must learn the language and 

culture of the foreign land he visits, and he is often faced with the uncertainty of not 

understanding the locals. As Calder so brilliantly notes, Omoo marks a shift away from 

this early mode of travel. Like the tourists discussed more fully in the following chapters, 

the narrator of Omoo is faced not with incomprehensibility but with an already 

established system of communication, an infrastructure that obviates the need to learn a 

foreign country’s language and discourages any inquiries into native culture beyond what 

is covered in the standard tour. 

The distinction between Tommo as traveler and Omoo’s narrator as tourist also 

calls attention to the new balance of linguistic knowledge and, consequently, of linguistic 

power represented in the later book. For the most part, the whites in Omoo do not need to 

learn Polynesian because the natives already speak a form of English. This pidgin English 

is by definition a market language, and its purpose is to enable the exchange of both ideas 

and goods across a cultural barrier. Thus, the islanders’ “broken English” in Omoo is not 

an object of ridicule—it is evidence of their mastery of the market language, their 

capability within the system of colonial exchange. They use the language of power for 

their own benefit and even, as Eric J. Sundquist and Gavin Jones will argue of the slaves 

in “Benito Cereno,” for the subversive purpose of reclaiming economic if not political 

power from their colonizers. Despite previous critics’ characterization of pidgin English 

as demeaning dialect, the pidgin spoken in Omoo can be read as a sign of empowerment. 



 

150 

Moreover, beneath Omoo’s surface of seemingly comic “broken English,” 

Melville also scrutinizes the act of translation, marking its potential for linguistic 

subversion while continuing Typee’s analysis of the inherent incommensurability of 

cross-cultural exchange. One example echoes the play with nautical jargon found in 

Cooper’s sea tales. When the “shore doctor” visits the sailors incarcerated on Tahiti, he 

inquires after one’s health, but he is unable to understand the nautical answer. First, the 

sailor in question replies, “‘I’m afeard, doctor, I’ll soon be losing the number of my 

mess!’ (a sea phrase, for departing this life)” (134). Then, the doctor’s appeal for 

clarification gets only this unhelpful response: 

“Why,” exclaimed Flash Jack, who volunteered as interpreter, “he means 

he’s going to croak” (die). (134) 

Only after further explanation does the shore doctor finally understand. By placing 

translations of these nautical phrases in parentheses, and implying that they require an 

interpreter, Melville follows Cooper in equating the sailor’s jargon with foreign language. 

And the implication that even versions of English might require a kind of translation 

makes the possibility of perfect cross-cultural communication seem even more remote. 

Another example of translation is the sermon the narrator hears at the “Church of 

the Cocoa-Nuts,” a scene that recalls the worship service observed by Stewart. Unlike 

Stewart, the narrator is unwilling to trust in the universality of religious sentiment as 

illuminated by his own rudimentary Polynesian, so he has the native language interpreted 

for him by “an intelligent Hawaiian sailor” whom he asks to “hear every word, and tell 

me what you can, as the missionary goes on” (173). Before continuing with the content of 

the sermon, the narrator further notes:  



 

151 

Jack’s was not, perhaps, a critical version of the discourse; and, at the 

time, I took no notes of what he said. Nevertheless, I will here venture to 

give what I remember of it; and, as far as possible, in Jack’s phraseology, 

so as to lose nothing by a double translation. (173) 

These comments indicate that the narrator does not fully trust either the original 

translation or his own transcription of it. Although the sermon’s pidgin English seems 

comic, and Melville uses the episode to make offensive generalizations about the 

materiality of the Tahitian people, this comment about translation prefigures the inclusion 

of similarly translated accounts in Moby-Dick and “Benito Cereno.” Mary K. Edwards 

sums up the subversive potential of translation in this scene when she asks, “With all 

these layers, how can we trust any words of the sermon as we read it in Omoo, and even 

more importantly, how can we trust any of its words at all?” (110). It would be 

disingenuous to argue that the sermon’s multiple translations can entirely erase the 

negative characterization of the Tahitians it contains, or that they can erase all of the 

other stereotypical characterizations that have made Omoo a far less common subject of 

postcolonial readings than Typee. Still, it is important to note that this undercutting of 

official speech through its translation sets a precedent for Melville’s unquestionably 

subversive treatment of the translated deposition that ends “Benito Cereno.” 

 In a final example of translation, Melville more pointedly critiques the Christian 

missionaries. A minor character is introduced as “Ereemear Po-Po; or, to render the 

Christian name back again into English—Jeremiah Po-Po” (277). Like many of the odd 

habits and various vices of the natives, such “curious combinations of names” are 

produced by white civilization and by the missionaries who “insist upon changing to 

something else whatever is objectionable” in the patronymic (277). Consequently, the 

narrator explains, “when Jeremiah came to the font, and gave his name as Narmo-Nana 



 

152 

Po-Po (something equivalent to The-Darer-of-Devils-by-Night), the reverend gentleman 

officiating told him, that such a heathenish appellation would never do” (277). Just as the 

missionary likely misinterprets the significance of Jeremiah’s original name, his new 

Biblical appellation also gets altered in its translation, as do “Adamo (Adam), Nooar 

(Noah), Daveedar (David), Earcobar (James), Eorna (John), Patoora (Peter), Ereemear 

(Jeremiah), &c.” (277). With a final joke about the futility of such practices, Melville 

concludes, “And thus did he come to be named Jeremiah Po-Po; or, Jeremiah-in-the-

Dark—which he certainly was, I fancy, as to the ridiculousness of his new cognomen” 

(277). The ridiculousness of the name derives from its repeated translation between 

English and Tahitian. Each translation is accompanied by a loss of original meaning until 

only nonsense remains. 

These moments of problematic translation contribute to an aspect of Omoo that is 

too easily overlooked in favor of the novel’s frequent recourse to comic stereotypes: an 

enlightened critique of cross-cultural communication approaching the middle ground of 

true understanding that proved so elusive in Typee. For example, when Doctor Long 

Ghost dreams of staying in Tamai, he outlines the following outrageous plans:  

I’ll put up a banana-leaf as a physician from London—deliver lectures on 

Polynesian antiquities—teach English in five lessons, of one hour each—

establish power-looms for the manufacture of tappa—lay out a public park 

in the middle of the village, and found a festival in honour of Captain 

Cook! (245) 

As with Melville’s earlier condemnation of European interference in Tahitian culture, 

these plans, however well intentioned, will likely serve only to corrupt the village the 

Doctor finds so pleasing. And, indicative of the short-sightedness and superficiality of 

such proposals, the plan to teach English in a mere five hours demonstrates once again 



 

153 

the characteristic failure of white colonizers to recognize the difficulties of cross-cultural 

communication. Whatever amount of English could be taught in such a short period of 

time could only produce a dialogue as superficial as the Doctor’s proposed festival. And 

such a limited knowledge of standard English would likely leave any natives so briefly 

instructed babbling both comically and incomprehensibly. 

Another example that undercuts a reading of Omoo’s pidgin English as simply 

demeaning is the seemingly deaf and dumb hermit, called by the chapter heading “A 

Dealer in the Contraband” (271). When the narrator and Doctor Long Ghost come upon 

the old man, they report: “with a variety of uncouth gestures, he soon made us welcome; 

informing us, by the same means, that he was both deaf and dumb; he then motioned us 

into his dwelling” (271-72). At first, the hermit seems to be participating in the same 

comically barbaric gesturing that often serves to degrade racial others. He attempts “to 

make himself understood by signs; most of which were so excessively ludicrous, that we 

made no doubt he was perpetrating a series of pantomimic jokes” (272). It is soon 

revealed, however, that this stereotype is actually a ruse. When the hermit does break his 

silence to berate the narrator and Doctor for not appreciating his liquor, the man 

exclaims, “‘Ah, karhowree sabbee lee-lee, ena arva tee maitai!’ in other words, what a 

blockhead of a white man! this is the real stuff!” (272). As the night progresses, Melville 

depicts the Doctor and his host in a scene of comic fellowship that anticipates Queequeg 

and Ishmael at the Spouter Inn: 

Fancy Varvy and the doctor, then; lovingly tippling, and brimming over 

with a desire to become better acquainted; the doctor politely bent upon 

carrying on the conversation in the language of his host, and the old hermit 

persisting in trying to talk English. The result was, that between the two, 

they made such a fricassee of vowels and consonants, that it was enough 

to turn one’s brain. (274) 



 

154 

Melville first used the phrase “fricassee of vowels and consonants” in the deleted passage 

describing Kory-Kory’s “eloquence” (see Bryant, Unfolding 385), but the humor here 

does not truly denigrate either the Doctor or Varvy. Such linguistic confusion is the 

natural result of the language barrier between them. In this idyllic scene, the barrier need 

not be a cause for dislike or aggression. Moreover, by attempting to meet each other 

halfway linguistically, Varvy and the Doctor enact the creation of a pidgin language. In 

this scene, which begins with Varvy’s subversive misrepresentation of his ability to 

speak, Melville posits an alternative to the decay of native culture represented elsewhere 

in Omoo. Instead of one dominating the other, the Doctor and Varvy represent an ideal of 

fellowship and equal, if imperfect, communication. Such moments may not entirely offset 

the work’s many stereotypes, but they provide a solution, a pidgin compromise, to the 

imperialist extremes of incomprehensibility and assimilation. 

 

Melville’s next book, Mardi (1849), marks a shift away from the more realistic 

representations of cross-cultural encounter in the semi-autobiographical works that 

preceded it. But as Melville’s focus on the linguistic exchanges of colonialism and 

imperialism begins to break down, he extends his earlier critiques of translation to a 

critique of language’s power to convey a fixed and certain meaning. As the concrete 

depictions of colonial language encounters found in Typee and Omoo fall away in the 

midst of Mardi’s elaborate allegory, Melville begins to theorize language’s inadequacy as 

an index of truth, thus suggesting an inherent fallibility in all aspects of human speech. 

Nevertheless, as Russ Pottle rightly observes, in Mardi, in contrast to Typee, 

“verbal communication presents no problem” and “[t]he language barrier is oddly done 



 

155 

away with, simply evaporates . . . and islanders begin to speak with a pseudo-Elizabethan 

syntax favored by the narrator during rhetorical flights” (147). This observation is 

accurate for the vast majority of the novel, but it is interesting to note that a shift in 

Melville’s treatment of multilingualism accompanies Mardi’s infamous shift in genre 

from sea adventure to philosophical allegory.
20

 In the scenes before Taji begins his 

voyage around the archipelago, Melville still gives some attention to the actual languages 

being spoken. For example, Samoa says “Look there:—Annatoo!” in what is identified as 

“broken English” (66). Indeed, Merrell R. Davis suggests that Melville may have added 

the character of Samoa for his ability to “act as interpreter among the Kingsmill 

islanders” (58). When the party first lands in Mardi, Samoa does interpret the speech of 

the islanders for Taji and Jarl (Melville, Mardi 164). When Taji and Jarl meet with the 

priest Aleema, it is also clear that they do not understand his language, as Aleema 

communicates with “a significant sign” (132). Instead of quoting him directly, Taji 

indicates that the priest “gave [them] to know” (132). Likewise, Taji’s party “[make] 

signs of amity” in the absence of a shared language (134, emphasis added).
21

 All of these 

                                                 
20

 For an extremely thorough discussion of Melville’s process of writing Mardi and the 

novel’s various shifts in focus, see Merrell R. Davis’s book Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless 

Voyage. Watson Branch makes an interesting and persuasive argument for a modification 
of Davis’s chronology, locating the addition of Yillah and Hautia’s flower messengers at 

the final stage of Mardi’s composition. I would argue, however, that Melville’s attention 

to language in the first meetings with Yillah suggests that these scenes were part of the 

original, more realistic plan of the book, and not added in the final stages of composition. 

Both Davis and Branch agree that the opening sequences of the novel belong to a version 

of Mardi that would have been more like a continuation of Typee and Omoo than the final 

product. 

21
 The most concentrated attention to multilingualism occurs in the first interaction 

between Taji and Yillah. First, Taji notes, “unconsciously, I addressed her in my own 

tongue” (137). When Yillah replies, she “slowly chant[s] to herself several musical 

words, unlike those of the Islanders” (137). Then, Taji tries speaking Polynesian. Yillah 



 

156 

examples suggest that Melville originally intended Mardi to depict the same kind of 

linguistic encounter found in Typee and Omoo. Shortly after Taji arrives on the Mardian 

archipelago, however, such attention to multilingualism abruptly disappears, and no more 

is said of the difficulty communicating with the islanders Taji presumably would have 

had. It is never mentioned that the dialogue throughout most of the book, though 

presented in English, would really have been spoken in some dialect of Polynesian (or 

whatever Melville would have the inhabitants of Mardi speak).  

At the same time, while the linguistic encounter of Taji and the Mardians is not 

Melville’s focus in the way that communication between Tommo and the Nukuhivans 

was in Typee, Melville does address the incommensurability of translation, as well as the 

incommensurability of cultural and economic exchange, on a more theoretical level. For 

example, “Champollion Mohi” translates the hieroglyphics on Vivenza’s arch: “In-this-

re-publi-can-land-all-men-are-born-free-and-equal” and “Except-the-tribe-of-Hamo” 

(512-13). On one hand, these hieroglyphics appear to translate seamlessly to English, just 

as the country of Vivenza must “translate” into America for Mardi’s allegory to signify. 

But the translation is certainly not effortless, as evidenced when Mohi interprets the 

strange and sometimes small characters “slowly” and with “much screwing of his eyes 

(512-13). Michael C. Berthold has even noted that this message, though written in stone, 

is “self-disintegrating, as in the syllabification of ‘re-publi-can’” (“Born” 19). Another 

                                                                                                                                                 

gestures that he should speak English again, but realizing that she does not understand 

him, Taji returns to speaking Polynesian and in this way elicits a “[b]roken” account of 

her history (137). Yillah’s strange affinity for English hints at her true origin—the 

daughter of murdered missionaries. That her first language, though forgotten, might 

affect her pronunciation of Polynesian is a bit of linguistic realism similar to that found 

throughout Typee. The difficulty Taji has communicating with Yillah also serves to 

heighten the mystery surrounding her character. 



 

157 

example of Melville’s play with translation is the flower language of Hautia’s 

messengers, which Melville borrowed from the numerous books on the subject popular at 

the time (Kelley, Herman 46; Finkelstein 217; Davis 59). Hautia’s heralds appear 

throughout Mardi waving various blossoms, and Yoomy attempts to interpret their 

meaning for Taji. Although Yoomy does not appear to struggle with these translations, 

the messages themselves remain vague. As Media remarks, “Was ever queen more 

enigmatical?” (268). Maxine Moore even points out an example where Yoomy’s 

translation is incorrect, arguing that “Yoomy’s interpretation of the flower messages is 

not to be trusted” (167, 184).
22

 Finally, Melville casts further doubt on language in 

general when he describes the naming of the Pontiffs of Maramma. Because the “the 

leading sound in [the Pontiff’s] name was banned to ordinary uses[,] . . . the language of 

Maramma was incessantly fluctuating; and had become so full of jargonings, that the 

birds in the groves were greatly puzzled; not knowing where lay the virtue of sounds, so 

incoherent” (108). In Melville’s subsequent digression about the inability of men and 

birds to understand each other, the conclusion of both that “it was impossible [the other] 

could be holding intelligent discourse” mirrors the kind of ethnographic disparagement 

born of linguistic misunderstanding that characterizes most colonial encounters (108). 

One of the most interesting examples of cultural exchange is the maker of idols. 

He describes his trade: 

“When I cut down the trees for my idols,” said he, “they are nothing but 

logs; when upon those logs, I chalk out the figures of my images, they yet 

                                                 
22

 Moore further argues, somewhat less persuasively, that “[t]he reader is expected to 

recognize Yoomy’s error of interpretation and to inform himself by referring to one of the 

many books of flower symbolism so popular in Melville’s day” (167-69). Her book also 

contains a detailed chart of the flowers’ interpretations (168). 



 

158 

remain logs; when the chisel is applied, logs they are still; and when all 

complete, I at last stand them up in my studio, even then they are logs. 

Nevertheless, when I handle the pay, they are as prime gods, as ever were 

turned out in Maramma.” (114) 

David Simpson has argued of this scene: 

With the insight that some people are making a healthy living out of 

fashioning images for others to worship, Melville touches on what I shall 

argue to be a dominant concern in nineteenth-century inquiries into the 

ethics of representation. In his conflation of the primitive with the 

civilized, and the implied ubiquity of the forgers of images, he seems to 

speak for a world in which there is no remaining recourse to a purer 

alternative. (Fetishism 9) 

In light of Simpson’s reading, Melville’s critique of such a “[forger] of images” resonates 

with the argument that trading sandalwood is immoral because it makes one an accessory 

to idolatry, a charge which Cooper explores in The Crater. Simpson’s argument 

highlights the uneasy conflation of religion and capitalism, as well as the seeming 

inevitability of that connection in both savage and civilized cultures. Read alongside the 

absurd Mardian practice of using teeth as currency, the idol maker’s admission also 

shows the arbitrariness of value. Just as it is only convention that makes teeth function as 

money instead of gold, paper, or even the trifles discussed in the previous chapter, it is 

only the buyer’s belief that a log is an idol, represented by the purchase of said log, that 

makes it so. Moreover, as demonstrated in Melville’s footnote explaining the term 

“tabooed Kannaka,” only common usage and convention give a word any particular 

signification. Thus, the idol maker’s recognition that his logs are not inherently or 

universally gods, but only become gods when their buyers accept them as such mirrors 

the recognition that words have no inherent meaning and that the concepts they designate 

are not universal categories but only sets of particularities grouped by cultural 

convention. Melville, like Cooper in Mercedes of Castile and The Crater, augments his 



 

159 

play with systems of linguistic meaning with an examination of the analogous systems of 

economic and religious value, simultaneously tying all to the history of colonial 

encounter. But in contrast to Cooper, whose more conventional views of trade ultimately 

reinforced the West’s civilizing mission, Melville’s economic critique comes far closer to 

suggesting that any system of value, or any way of life, could be equally valid. 

 

In Moby-Dick (1851) as in Mardi, Melville’s earlier engagement with linguistic 

encounter in a colonial context develops into a more theoretical approach to the nature of 

language itself. Melville reacts not only to the expectations of easy translation found in 

the literature of imperialism, but also to the idealism that assumes one’s own cultural 

concepts are universal truths that must translate easily into any human tongue. It is by 

similarly appealing to universality that the wish for a cosmopolitan brotherhood can slip 

into a coercive imperialism.
23

 In nineteenth-century America, the most visible form of 

this idealism was the philosophy of the Transcendentalists. As Richard Hardack argues, 

“For the American transcendentalist, all languages and all human cultures are translated 

facets of One thing,” and, as a result, “Emerson believe[s] that through boundless space 

and time, all physical forces and human languages and customs are translatable” (64-65). 

Emerson’s comments on translation, particularly his statement that he does not “hesitate 

to read . . . all good books, in translations” because “what is really best in any book is 

translatable” (Society 182), demonstrate the same assumption of universal truth that fuels 

                                                 
23

 This slippage from cosmopolitanism to imperialism is most evident in the ideas of 

Anacharsis Cloots, as discussed in the Introduction. 



 

160 

the imperialist’s disregard for cultural difference.
24

 As Melville transitions away from the 

concrete depiction of colonial language encounter found in his early narratives, he 

continues to examine the inherent incommensurability revealed by translation, positing 

this incommensurability as an alternative to Transcendentalist universalism. 

A brief examination of several key sections of Moby-Dick demonstrates 

Melville’s increased theoretical interest in the nature of language and translation. From 

its beginning section, “Etymology,” Moby-Dick demonstrates deep engagement with 

linguistic difference.
25

 At first, the presentation of the word for whale in Hebrew, Greek, 

Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, English, French, Spanish, Fegee, 

and Erromangoan would seem to indicate its easy translatability (xvi). Indeed, all of the 

languages in the list except Hebrew look or sound like at least one other, showing the 

relation of words across different tongues and the presumable ease of understanding and 

translating these related languages. This linguistic certainty cannot survive further 

scrutiny, however. First, the entire “Etymology” section is undercut by the bathetic figure 

of the “Late Consumptive Usher . . . threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain” (xv). 

Moreover, readers of Typee or Omoo might recognize that the Fegee version of “whale,” 

“PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE” (xvi), might be translated more literally as “big-big-fish,” 

revealing a different understanding of the creature that, like the “big canoe” in Typee, 

undercuts the fixity of any cross-linguistic equivalence.
26

 Indeed, Yunte Huang calls 

                                                 
24

 See the Introduction for further discussion of Emerson’s views of language. 

25
 Robert T. Tally, Jr. (59), Paul Lyons (“Global” 53), and Mark Bauerlein (24) all 

suggest that “Etymology” introduces and prefigures the variety of perspectives that 

characterize the novel as a whole. 

26
 Indeed, it could be translated with even less syntactic “liberality” as “fish-big-big.”  



 

161 

attention to the way the list seems to promise a chronology of languages but offers only 

“structural incoherence,” which “suggests above all the failure of language to denominate 

the whale successfully” (76). 

One of the most perplexing aspects of the section is the following quote from 

Richard Hakluyt: 

“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name 

a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, 

the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, 

you deliver that which is not true.” (xv) 

Previous critics have noted that this comment on the significance of the letter “H” is 

accompanied by errors in the Hebrew and Greek words for whale, where each alphabet’s 

equivalent of “H” is substituted for the proper letter.
27

 Gordon V. Boudreau provides an 

excellent survey of the many explanations that have been given for this passage and 

concludes that, for Melville, “‘whale’ was not a dead word in a dusty library’s antiquated 

lexicons, but a living word articulated by aspiration, the breath of life” (6). Doubtless, 

Melville makes Hakluyt’s claim for the significance of “H” intentionally enigmatic by 

extracting it from its original context. A closer examination of the section of Hakluyt’s 

Principal Navigations from which the passages originates reveals that the quotation 

resonates with the issues of cross-cultural communication found in Melville’s earlier 

works. 

In his discussion of Iceland, Hakluyt critiques an earlier historian, Sebastian 

Munster, for reporting that mariners had weighed anchor on the backs of whales, thinking 

                                                 
27

 See, for example, Dorothee Metlitzki’s “The Letter ‘H’ in Melville’s Whale.” 

According to Michael West, “the Hebrew characters Melville supplied form the word not 

for whale but for grace” (333). 



 

162 

them to be land (567). Hakluyt also critiques Munster’s claim that “[t]hey are called in 

their tongue Trollwal Tuffelwalen, that is to say, the deuilish Whale” (568). The passage 

quoted by Melville is followed by this explanation: 

for val in our language signifieth not a Whale, but chusing or choise of the 

verbe Eg vel, that is to say, I chuse, or I make choise, from whence val is 

deriued, &c. But a Whale is called Hualur with vs, & therefore you ought 

to haue written Trollhualur. Neither doeth Troll signifie the deuill, as you 

interprete it, but certaine Giants that liue in mountaines. You see therefore 

(and no maruel) how you erre in the whole word. (568) 

In Melville’s source, then, the significance of the letter “H” is that, without it, the word 

means something else entirely. Hakluyt further criticizes Munster’s translation of “troll,” 

which obviously (to a speaker of English) does not have the same meaning as “devil.” 

Supported by these observations, Hakluyt explains the dangers of writing about a land 

without fully understanding its language, the same fault that Melville could find in the 

sources of Typee. Thus the true significance of “H” is how easily the meaning of a word 

can be lost, particularly when translating between strange languages, which is exactly 

what the pale Usher attempts in assembling this “Etymology.” 

The multiplicity of languages in “Etymology” is mirrored much later in the novel 

by the multiple interpretations given to the iconic doubloon. In the chapter of that name, 

the crew of the Pequod all examine the coin Ahab has set as the reward for sighting the 

white whale. As John T. Matteson notes, “As each crew member passes before this 

emblem, it acquires a new wealth of interpretation” (180). Mark Bauerlein lists these 

readings as “an image of self, a Christian icon, a pagan biography, an exchange value, 

and a demonic emblem” (25). Like the dental currency and the idol carver in Mardi, “The 

Doubloon” is another playful example of how the arbitrariness of value can be analogous 

to the arbitrariness of linguistic meaning. Accordingly, Flask calculates that one gold 



 

163 

doubloon is “worth sixteen dollars” and is thus equivalent to “nine hundred and sixty 

cigars” (433). But the coin is also an emblem of translation, as when Starbuck compares 

the coin to “Belshazzar’s awful writing,” from Daniel 5, an archetypal message requiring 

interpretation (432). The famous writing on the wall refers to units of weight and, like the 

doubloon, corresponding measures of value. At the same time, the coin has its own 

historical significance. Gesa Mackenthun examines the various appearances of Spanish 

doubloons throughout Melville’s works and argues that the sailors’ interpretations in this 

chapter mask the “historical realities of the colonial system” that the coin represents 

(“Postcolonial” 539). As demonstrated in the previous chapter, such colonial systems are 

built upon the exploitation of native economies’ incommensurability.  

Finally, when Pip offers his own commentary on the doubloon’s many 

interpretations and interpreters with the “too crazy-witty” conjugation of “I look, you 

look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look” (434-35), he connects the various 

significations of the coin back to language. But language presented as conjugation is far 

from the transcendental view of language as divine naming.
28

 Pip’s attention to grammar 

demonstrates the arbitrariness of language’s construction. Just as the coin itself is only 

conventionally rather than universally valuable, the rules of grammar have very little 

connection to actual things. Neither language nor currency points back to any 

transcendental truth. Furthermore, Ishmael’s response to Pip, “Caw! caw! caw! caw! 

caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow?” (434), reduces the already arbitrary grammar to animal noise. 

                                                 
28

 Nina Baym describes Melville’s developing sense of the arbitrariness of language 

through Moby-Dick and Pierre when she argues, “given Melville’s Emerson-derived 

notion of language as proceeding from a divine Author or Namer, the loss of belief in an 

Absolute entailed the loss not only of truth in the universe but also of coherence and 

meaning in language” (910). 



 

164 

Thus, in “The Doubloon,” Melville provocatively connects the incommensurability of 

various systems of meaning, particularly economic ones, to the arbitrariness of language, 

undercutting any perceived universality of either monetary or linguistic sign systems. 

A final section of Moby-Dick that speaks to the issue of translation is the “Town-

Ho’s Story,” which recounts a sailors’ rebellion aboard the Town-Ho and the vessel’s 

deadly encounter with Moby Dick. The chapter’s framing and narration is quite unusual. 

Before commencing his story, Ishmael explains, “For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve 

the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, 

one saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn” (243). The 

tale is then punctuated by Ishmael’s digressive answers to the questions of his Peruvian 

audience. Although many critics have offered an explanation of this framing device, 

Robert T. Tally, Jr., is one of the few who acknowledges that Ishmael’s original Peruvian 

telling of the story would “presumably” have been in Spanish (63).
29

 Thus, within the 

fiction of the frame as described, the “Town-Ho’s Story” included in Moby-Dick would 

have to be a kind of English translation of Ishmael’s original telling. 

True to his ongoing focus on the unreliability of translation, Melville complicates 

the versions of the tale with numerous retellings until, as in the popular children’s game, 

it seems impossible that the first whisperings could contain the same message as the final 

account. First, Ishmael explains that there are two levels of information circulating 

                                                 
29

 Philip J. Egan (345), Heinz Kosok (54), and Mary K. Edwards (46-47) all read the 

framing in terms of Ishmael’s narrative art. Wyn Kelley and Amy Kaplan, on the other 

hand, focus on the geographical and political significance of Lima, interpreting the frame 

as commentary on colonialism (Kelley, “Style” 68) and as a “transnational [circuit] of 

knowledge” that “reinforce[s] the imagined truth of national character” (Kaplan, 

“Transnational” 44-45). 



 

165 

aboard the Pequod: The official version, known to all, was communicated in a “short 

gam” that included “strong news of Moby Dick” (242). There is also a “secret part of the 

tragedy,” unknown to the captain of either ship, that was told to Tashtego by “three 

confederate white seamen” and then recounted again to the common sailors, partly when 

Tashtego “rambled in his sleep”—not the most reliable method of communication (242). 

Ishmael reports that his own tale will combine these various versions. At the end of the 

story, moreover, Ishmael assures his listeners of the truth of his account by claiming, “I 

have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney” (259). Therefore, the 

various versions of the “Town-Ho’s Story” circulated aboard the Pequod are complicated 

further by yet another retelling Ishmael heard after the ship’s destruction. Just as 

Ishmael’s Spanish telling is translated into English, these various versions are, in a sense, 

“translated” into one narrative. The tale itself can thus be read as a kind of double 

translation. A similar play with translation appears in the court documents at the end of 

“Benito Cereno,” another story of rebellion recounted in Lima, and there the emphasis on 

the unreliability of translation is both clearer and more deliberate.
30

  

Uncertain Translation in “Benito Cereno” 

“Benito Cereno” (1855) is well known as a story of slave insurrection and as an 

adept treatment of the power struggle between master and slave.
31

 Such readings 

                                                 
30

 I am indebted to Donald Pease for his comments and invaluable feedback regarding 

“The Doubloon” and “The Town-Ho’s Story” during the conference Shifting Tides, 

Anxious Borders at Binghamton University, April 20 to 21, 2012. 

31
 Sundquist, for example, has emphasized “Melville’s invocation of Caribbean 

revolution” and “the historical dimensions of his masquerade of rebellion” (147). Carolyn 

L. Karcher, in contrast, asserts that “Benito Cereno” is not “primarily a dramatization of 

slave revolt . . . but rather an exploration of the white racist mind and how it reacts in the 



 

166 

understandably focus on Melville’s treatment of domestic slavery, and indeed this is a 

valid and valuable interpretation of the tale. But reading the events aboard the San 

Dominick in the tradition of the literature of travel and exploration reveals a linguistic 

context that has as much in common with Columbus as with Nat Turner.
32

 As the 

following reading will demonstrate, Melville’s earlier engagement with colonial language 

encounters culminates in the extensive play with translation contained within “Benito 

Cereno.” Ultimately, the inherent difficulties of the translator’s task—translation’s 

inability to fully revoke the curse of Babel and unite the globe’s multiplicity of 

languages—decenters any account of a fixed and universal truth, critiquing the 

Transcendentalist universalism that can too easily slip into the imperialist mission of 

converting all cultural difference to Western standards. 

As Maurice S. Lee has argued, the most “provocative” interpretations of “Benito 

Cereno” treat it as a story about language (“Melville’s” 497), but it is necessary to view 

the work’s play with language in the context of colonial encounter to understand its full 

significance.
33

 The story’s combination of colonial and linguistic themes is signaled, as 

                                                                                                                                                 

face of a slave insurrection” (Shadow 128). Similarly, Joseph Schiffman also views 

Delano as “a microcosm of American attitudes of the time toward Negroes” (33). Other 

readings focus on Delano’s status as a typical “American” (see Spanos, Herman 108-109; 

McWilliams, Hawthorne 179). 

32
 Indeed, with its references both to the largest successful slave rebellion and to the first 

Caribbean island colonized by the Spanish, the name San Dominick suggests both. 

33
 There have been a number of insightful readings of Melville’s treatment of language in 

“Benito Cereno.” For example, Laura Barrett focuses on “[t]he novella’s linguistic 

uncanniness” (405). Reinhold J. Dooley argues that, “by problematizing race, ‘Benito 

Cereno’ presents Melville’s uneasiness concerning the indeterminateness of language and 

ultimately of meaning itself” (41). For Cesare Casarino, “Benito Cereno” “investigate[s] 

blockages of communication, representational impasses, [and] narrative conundrums” 

(56). Likewise, Jon Hauss focuses on the importance of language in the text and argues 



 

167 

Hester Blum (“Atlantic” 121), Darryl Hattenhauer (9), and Markus Heide (49) have all 

noted, when we learn in the concluding documents that “the ship’s proper figurehead” is 

“the image of Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World” (Melville, “Benito” 

107).
34

 The entire drama of the figurehead is Melville’s addition, so neither the reference 

to Columbus nor the mixed spelling of his name originates in the source text. Dominique 

Marçais notes that “Benito Cereno” is the only work in which Melville refers to the 

famous navigator as “Christopher Colon,” and argues that “[t]he pun on Columbus / 

Colon / colonization stresses the oppressive and negative aspects of [Columbus’s] whole 

enterprise” (55). Marçais uses Melville’s strange combination of the English and Spanish 

spellings of Columbus’s name, as well as the mixed French and English in “San 

Dominick,” to argue that the tale’s multilingualism “undoubtedly connects and indicts 

both the Old and the New World” (56). As the following reading will demonstrate, the 

partial translation of the name “Christopher Colon,” and the history of linguistic 

encounter that the man epitomizes, are but a small part of Melville’s treatment of the 

failure of imperialist translation in this renowned story.  

                                                                                                                                                 

that “the central form of masquerade examined by, and ultimately dominating, the text is 

linguistic” (5). Others have augmented readings of slavery and slave insurrection with 

interpretations that relate Melville’s story to “U.S. imperial history” (Doolen 189), 

“American expansionism” (Emery 54), “the expansionist effort at Manifest Destiny” 

(Goddard 235), and a “literary Pan-Americanism” that “illuminates colonial and 

postcolonial history” (Heide 53).  

34
 Sanborn has even connected Melville’s Columbus reference to the history of the 

discourse of cannibalism. Sanborn argues, “By juxtaposing the skeleton of the 

slaveholder with the figurehead of Columbus on a ship named the San Dominick, 

[Melville] offers the legions of readers who were familiar with the history of Columbus’s 

voyages an indirect but emphatic warning: If you conclude on the basis of bones that a 

group of people are cannibals, you will be repeating Columbus’s monumentally self-

interested mistake” (Sign 184). 



 

168 

“Benito Cereno” is also a kind of mystery, and as in any mystery, the beginning 

of the story is best understood in light of its end. After the climactic unmasking of the 

slave rebellion aboard the San Dominick, Melville, following A Narrative of Voyages and 

Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres by the real Amasa Delano, includes a 

lengthy section of legal documents, translated transcriptions of the depositions held to 

investigate the events aboard the unfortunate ship. Several critics have already 

acknowledged the significance of the tale’s seemingly tedious denouement, but it 

deserves closer attention for the additional level of unreliability Melville introduces to the 

supposedly official documents.
35

 

Unlike Melville’s main narration, which greatly expands upon Delano’s account, 

the translated deposition could be more aptly described as “revised” than “rewritten.” In 

the original version, the historical Delano gives the documents this introduction: 

The following Documents were officially translated, and are inserted 

without alteration, from the original papers. . . . My deposition and that of 

Mr. Luther, were communicated through a bad linguist, who could not 

speak the English language so well as I could the Spanish . . . . The 

Spanish captain’s deposition, together with my Mr. Luther’s and my own, 

were translated into English again, as now inserted; having thus undergone 

two translations. These circumstances, will, we hope, be a sufficient 

apology for any thing which may appear to the reader not to be perfectly 

consistent, one declaration with another; and for any impropriety of 

expression. (331) 

Such authorial modesty was by no means rare, but the convoluted history of the 

documents, which resembles the provenance of the “Town-Ho’s Story,” certainly leaves 

                                                 
35

 Spanos, for example, argues that, “in confirming [Delano’s] epiphany in the story 

proper, the poststory deposition precipitates its deconstruction” (Herman 124). Similarly, 

Mark C. Anderson (75), Joyce Sparer Adler (80), and Marvin Fisher (“Narrative” 449) 

also focus on how the deposition fails to provide the closure it seems to promise. 



 

169 

room to question their accuracy.
36

 But Melville does not stop at the unreliability inherent 

in the original dual translation as described by Delano. As Susan Weiner has also 

demonstrated (3-4), a close comparison of Melville’s version and its source reveals a 

series of deliberate alterations that highlight and then increase the untrustworthiness of 

the original transcripts.  

One way Melville casts doubt on the translated deposition is by creating the 

impression that details have been omitted. Unlike Delano, who claims the “[d]ocuments 

were officially translated, and [were] inserted without alteration” (331), Melville states 

that his transcripts were “selected, from among many others, for partial translation” (103, 

emphasis added). While “partial” might mean that only part of the transcripts were 

translated, it also carries the second meaning of an only partial transference from one 

language to another—perhaps the partial translation is made only somewhat intelligible 

to the reader. When comparing Melville’s version with his source, however, it becomes 

clear that Benito Cereno’s deposition is not abridged as its introduction suggests, but 

reproduced almost in its entirety and then expanded considerably. Melville often replaces 

simple passages with more embellished versions. For example, the source’s dry 

statement, “warning him that they would kill all the Spaniards, if they saw them speak, or 

plot any thing against them” (Delano 337), is replaced by Melville’s verbose version, 

“warning him and all of them that they should, soul and body, go the way of Don 

Alexandro if he saw them (the Spaniards) speak or plot anything against them (the 

                                                 
36

 Warner Berthoff also describes the ambiguity inherent in Delano’s original narrative 

and argues, “Melville’s leading impulse in working out the sequence of his retelling was 

to capitalize on just this material ambiguity, and on the delayed double-exposure it results 

in” (152). 



 

170 

negroes)” (108). Because the suggestion that Melville has abridged and condensed the 

deposition is quite clearly false (as comparison demonstrates, it is actually elaborated and 

expanded), Melville’s claim appears to be a deliberate attempt to cast doubt on the 

“partial” translation provided to the reader, inventing cause to suspect its insufficiency or 

its suppression of potentially crucial details. 

Throughout the text of the deposition, Melville makes the translated documents 

seem even more incomplete. Unlike its source, Melville’s version of Cereno’s deposition 

is punctuated by lines of asterisks. Like ellipses, these asterisks suggest that something is 

missing, that, somewhere in the dual transference of transcription and translation, some 

possibly valuable or essential information has been left out. But even on the rare 

occasions when parts of the source transcript are actually omitted, their length is only a 

fraction of that of the detailed passages Melville has inserted to replace and supposedly 

summarize them. The effect of these asterisks is compounded by the bracketed 

descriptions Melville inserts to describe the omitted material, such as: 

[And so the deposition goes on, circumstantially recounting the fictitious 

story dictated to the deponent by Babo, and through the deponent imposed 

upon Captain Delano; and also recounting the friendly offers of Captain 

Delano, with other things, but all of which is here omitted. After the 

fictitious, strange story, etc., the deposition proceeds:] (110) 

Part of this abridgement would seem to spare the reader from a repetition of events 

already detailed in the story proper, but the vague “with other things” and “etc.” imply 

that other details, perhaps unknown to the reader and perhaps important, may be 

withheld. In other cases, too, not only has nothing been omitted, but the descriptions 

themselves serve to cast further doubt on the documents. For example, Melville describes 

an alleged deletion as “many expressions of ‘eternal gratitude’ to the ‘generous Captain 



 

171 

Amasa Delano’” (111), making parts of the document seem superfluous while 

characterizing Cereno, its source, as a fawning fool. The next bracketed comment claims 

to take the place of “various random disclosures referring to various periods of time” 

(112), unnecessary details that make the deposition seem disorganized and pointless.  

Both Susan Weiner (4) and Carolyn L. Karcher (“Riddle” 214-15) have argued 

that the apparent imperfections of the court documents indicate the failures of law and of 

due process, particularly in such cases of slave rebellion.
37

 In light of Melville’s ongoing 

interest in language and translation, however, it is easy to recognize that the unreliability 

of the testimony is also caused by the language differences between the parties involved, 

and by the variations in meaning and connotation inevitably introduced by their 

translation. Taking these translated transcripts as the starting point for a reading of 

language encounter in “Benito Cereno,” it becomes clear that a pervasive trope of 

translation supports the tale’s argument for the unreliability of cross-cultural 

communication. 

The importance of language and translation in “Benito Cereno” is first signaled by 

the message on the prow of the San Dominick, which is reproduced in Spanish followed 

by its English translation: “‘Seguid vuestro jefe,’ (follow your leader)” (49). This motto—

                                                 
37

 Brook Thomas (120) and Bruce L. Grenberg (164) also call attention to the legal 

documents’ failure to bring the certainty and closure that they seem to promise. Leonard 

Tennenhouse discusses how Melville “use[s] the court documents to think his way 

toward a kind of resolution of a historically intractable problem that was beyond the 

cultural scope of the novelistic imagination” (124). He concludes, “Because Melville 

asserts power similar to that of the court over the materials of the story that is set in type, 

Benito Cereno provides a stark example of how one diasporic group achieves and 

maintains its hegemony in relation to others” (125). Likewise, Peter West argues that 

“Cereno’s deposition provides Melville with a link between his story’s fictional narration 

and the rhetoric of factual writing that submerges the former mode’s complexities and 

indeterminacies” (178). 



 

172 

and its threat that colonial power and domination will only lead to death, violence, and 

insurrection—has been a major focus of criticism, but the motto’s linguistic significance 

has received less attention. Typographically, the contrast between italics in quotation 

marks and roman type in parentheses establishes the contrast between the original and its 

translation, while emphasizing the dominance of the Spanish version. Moreover, 

someone familiar with Spanish would note that even this short translation is not a perfect 

equivalent of the original. The Spanish “vosotros” form of second person used in the 

command is informal and plural. The English “you” distinguishes neither number nor 

formality, so the nuances of the Spanish version are lost. There are also nuances in the 

translation not present in the original. While “leader” means both an authority figure and 

a spatial director, the Spanish “jefe” carries only the first denotation, meaning “boss” but 

not “guide.” Finally, the game “follow the leader,” which predates Melville’s story and 

which the translated motto invokes, is called in Spanish “jugar a lo que haga el rey” 

(roughly, to play at what the king does), not as “seguid vuestro jefe” (“Follow”; “Follow-

my-leader”). Thus, the typographical and linguistic differences between the juxtaposed 

versions serve to introduce the recurring themes of translation and of the unreliability of 

language. Interestingly, however, when the skeleton figurehead that accompanies the 

motto is revealed at the end of the story, the words are given only as “Follow your 

leader” (99), as if the unmasking of the actual state of things aboard the ship has 

translated the foreign language. 

Such emphasis on translation is only part of Melville’s general treatment of 

colonial language. For Delano, boarding the ship is like arriving in a foreign land. He is 

“at once surrounded by a clamorous throng of whites and blacks” (49), echoing Stewart’s 



 

173 

description of the Nukuhivans’ “noise, loud talking, hallooing, and various rude 

merriment” (6), as well as the countless similar arrivals in the archive of exploration and 

conquest. Delano’s position as traveler is reinforced by the comparison between boarding 

the ship and “entering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land” (Melville, 

“Benito” 50). Arriving on such a ship, the narration claims, is even stranger, immersing 

the visitor even more precipitously in the foreign: “The ship seems unreal; these strange 

costumes, gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep” (50). 

Much has been made of the gothic and supernatural description of the San Dominick, but 

the analogy to a foreign land is of equal importance. Like a traveler to an exotic country, 

Delano attempts to make sense of the strange behavior he observes there, but by 

assuming the actions and words of the “natives” can be easily interpreted, he misses the 

heart of their “culture.”  

As in Typee and Omoo, Melville pays close attention to the languages spoken 

aboard the San Dominick. Shortly after the theme of translation is introduced with the 

chalked motto, it becomes clear that most of the ensuing dialogue will also be a 

“translation” of things actually said in Spanish: “Captain Delano . . . [feels] no small 

satisfaction that, with persons in their condition he could—thanks to his frequent voyages 

along the Spanish main—converse with some freedom in their native tongue” (51). 

Delano is overly optimistic in this expectation of easy understanding, as he proves totally 

incapable of interpreting the real meaning and motive of the Spaniards’ speech. Later in 

his visit, Delano again exhibits pride in his linguistic ability when he “with a free step . . . 

advanced to the forward edge of the poop, issuing his orders in his best Spanish” (92). 

Delano’s seeming linguistic mastery is immediately undercut, however, by his belief that 



 

174 

the “few sailors and many negros” who obey him are “all equally pleased” (92). In truth, 

there is little equality in the positions of the Spaniards and Africans, and neither group is 

exactly “pleased” by Delano’s actions. Delano’s optimistic pride in his mastery of the 

Spanish language is matched by his appraisal of the speech of both the whites and the 

blacks on the San Dominick as he steps aboard: “But, in one language, and as with one 

voice, all poured out a common tale of suffering” (49). Despite his hopeful impression, 

the speech of the ship’s passengers is anything but monologic. The complexities of 

speech, both within and across languages, prevent the kind of total understanding that 

Delano naively expects. 

Delano’s original impression that everyone on the ship is speaking together in one 

language is made possible by his blindness to the true meanings of the rebelling slaves’ 

speech and actions. Like Columbus in Cooper’s Mercedes of Castile, Delano imagines 

the blacks live in a state of nature. Thus, when he sees “a slumbering negress” with her 

“wide-awake fawn, stark naked,” Delano muses, “There’s naked nature, now” (73). Laura 

Barrett points out, however, that “[b]y associating the wind [also described in the 

passage] with the child . . . Melville reminds us that the absence of language is not an 

indication of simplicity, nature, purity, and docility, but of duplicity, ambiguity, 

untranslatability” (415). More generally, Bernhard Radloff has also argued that such 

“motifs of the natural man. . . [function] parodically . . . because the seemingly 

unreflective slaves are ultimately exposed as authors of conspiracy and deception” 

(120).
38

 By aligning Delano’s impressions with the typical racism of colonial encounter, 

                                                 
38

 Edward S. Grejda has also examined the use of animal imagery to characterize the 

blacks aboard the San Dominick, but he points out that “[t]he animal images associated 

with the slaves likewise characterize the whites” and concludes that “[t]he similarity of 



 

175 

Melville highlights the failure of both to account for the real complexities of other 

cultures and peoples. 

As in much imperialist literature, Delano also finds the native language of the 

slaves incomprehensible, but instead of seeking to learn it and understand them, he 

discounts non-white speech as not worth understanding. The oakum-pickers are described 

as producing a “continuous, low, monotonous chant; droning and druling away like so 

many gray-headed bag-pipers playing a funeral march” (50). Whatever they may be 

saying in their native language does not seem to warrant a translation. Similarly, the 

general background noise on the ship is a “hubbub of voices” (51), again without 

meaning. The speech of the blacks is further described as “noisy indocility” (52) and 

“noisy confusion” (54). Like his vision of mother and child as untutored nature, Delano’s 

perception of the slaves’ language as pure noise conceals their true threat. In contrast to 

Delano’s underestimation of the blacks’ speech, Sundquist has examined the links 

between the clashing of the hatchet polishers and Ashanti drum language (166-67). Jones 

disagrees with Sundquist’s assumption that all of the slaves would speak the same 

African language, but he uses their lack of a common African language as an argument 

for Melville’s depiction of “an active and adaptable community capable of breaking 

through the barrier of tribal division by assuming the language of colonial power” (49). 

Either way, the true state of things aboard the ship indicates that the “noisy indocility” of 

the slaves is a mask for linguistically capable insurrection. Thus, Jon Hauss concludes 

from the deposition’s assertion that Babo “understands well the Spanish” that, 

                                                                                                                                                 

images attached to both blacks and whites can hardly lead to a precise dichotomy of evil 

and good” (142-43). 



 

176 

“[c]ontriving and enforcing a usage that shields a revolutionary restructuring of Spanish 

society, Babo turns the Spaniards’ own language against them” (9). Because Delano 

underestimates the speech of the rebelling slaves, he remains ignorant of their true power. 

Furthermore, Melville’s illustration of the blindness produced by cultural 

stereotypes extends beyond Delano’s most obviously racist attitudes. Delano’s 

underestimation of the Africans is mirrored by his inability to look beyond Spanish 

stereotypes to analyze Benito Cereno’s strange behavior.
39

 Delano decides that, “to the 

Spaniard’s black-letter text, it was best, for awhile, to leave open margin” (65). Not only 

does Delano equate the captain with language requiring interpretation (however 

postponed), but, by referencing a “black-letter text” in particular, he also invokes a type 

of print that is emblematically dark and arcane. Furthermore, while musing over all of the 

strange things he has witnessed, Delano discounts Cereno’s “capricious” behavior by 

thinking, “But as a nation . . . these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard 

has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it” (79). Because he is so quick to 

attribute any of Cereno’s oddities to his Spanishness, Delano fails to realize that 

something is truly amiss. Despite his reliance on stereotypes, however, Delano also 

collapses all cultural difference. He muses, “Spaniards in the main are as good folks as 

any in Duxbury, Massachusetts” (79). This is the same kind of paradoxical attitude that 

                                                 
39

 Thus, Peter West has argued that Melville highlights the “slipperiness of ‘Spanish’ as a 

racial and national signifier” (176). Further emphasizing the importance of Spain, 

Sundquist argues, “The aura of ruin and decay that links Benito Cereno and his ship to 

Charles V and his empire points forward as well to the contemporary demise of Spanish 

power in the New World and the role of slave unrest in its revolutionary decline” (137). 

María DeGuzmán calls Melville’s tale “an allegorical history painting about the historical 

relations of the imperial powers of Spain and the United States and their respective 

involvement with slavery” (54). See also Iván Jaksić’s argument for the significance of 

Spain in nineteenth-century America, which includes a reading of “Benito Cereno.” 



 

177 

allows explorers and colonizers to perceive native language both as incomprehensible 

noise and as a series of easily translatable universals. Both extremes refuse to recognize 

that other cultures have legitimate differences that can only be understood after careful 

and extended attention. By comparing the Spanish people both to Americans and to 

British conspirators, Delano erases all cultural distinction, the better discernment of 

which might have allowed him to apprehend the true political implications of the events 

aboard the ship. 

 As Sundquist, Jones, and Hauss have all demonstrated, “Benito Cereno” recounts 

the implications of underestimating the language of the racial Other. In addition to these 

overt examples of linguistic encounter, the entire masquerade acted out before Delano is 

an allegory for the failure to interpret. As Sanborn aptly puts it, Melville makes his 

readers “recognize that the seemingly natural links between signs and meanings are in 

fact arbitrary” (Sign 191).
40

 Thus, in “Benito Cereno,” Melville expands Typee’s 

treatment of colonial language into a full-fledged critique of semiotics. While on board, 

Delano is constantly involved in the act of interpretation as he observes one peculiar 

occurrence after another. After seeing a white boy hit by a black one, “Captain Delano 

inquire[s] what this meant” (59). When the American first observes the “prisoner” Atufal, 

the African lowers his head “as much as to say, ‘no, I am content’” (62, emphasis added). 

Then, Delano sees the key around Cereno’s neck and, “from the servant’s muttered 

syllables diving the key’s purpose,” says, “So, Don Benito—padlock and key—

significant symbols, truly” (63). The narration then calls further attention to Delano’s 

                                                 
40

 Robert Foulke (25) and Anna Krauthammer (17) also point toward the ways Melville 

dramatizes acts of interpretation. 



 

178 

failures of interpretation by noting that he is “a man of such native simplicity as to be 

incapable of satire or irony” (63). Later, as Delano observes some of the Spanish sailors, 

he thinks “that one or two of them returned [his] glance and with a sort of meaning” (71). 

Still, their intended meaning remains unclear. Delano misinterprets all of these clues. He 

fails to translate the language of the deception until Cereno and his supposedly trusty 

servant are struggling at his feet.
41

 

The most famous of Delano’s failed interpretations occurs with an old sailor tying 

a complicated knot. Robert E. Burkholder calls the scene “a focal point for the criticism 

of Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’” and “a pivotal cipher for the stratified meanings of the 

story as a whole” (1). Likewise, Radloff asserts that the knot is “clearly emblematic of 

Delano’s own entanglement in undecipherable events, and of these events themselves” 

(168). If this incident is emblematic of “Benito Cereno” as a whole, it is also one of the 

tale’s most sustained plays with language. The man throws the knot at Delano “saying in 

broken English,—the first heard in the ship,—something to this effect—‘Undo it, cut it, 

quick’” (76). The reader is thus reminded that everything prior has been said in Spanish, 

but even this first bit of English is also translated into “something to this effect.” The 

sailor’s “broken English” is not totally comprehensible, so the dialogue given is only an 

approximation. Similarly, the “elderly negro” who then takes the knot speaks in only 

“tolerable Spanish” (76), again emphasizing the inconsistency and unreliability of speech 

                                                 
41

 In an interesting corollary to Melville’s depiction of absurd and perplexing gestures in 

Typee, Radloff examines how, in “Benito Cereno” too, “gesture, which the text 

frequently foregrounds as an index of meaningfulness, is no less ambiguous and 

inherently enigmatic than ‘conventional’ signs” (169). He concludes, “Once the 

opposition between the conventional (language) and the natural (the body’s 

comportment; the gesture) has collapsed, both semiotic systems appear as 

representational schemata posited by human subjectivity” (174). 



 

179 

even when both parties speak the same language. Finally, the “negro” who throws the 

knot overboard does it “with some African word, equivalent to pshaw” (76). The word 

“equivalent” heightens the phrase’s ambiguity, suggesting either that the African word 

had the same meaning as “pshaw,” or that it only sounded like “pshaw” with some other 

meaning unknown to either Delano or the reader. Either way, this is yet another example 

of unreliable translation and of the arbitrariness of linguistic signification. 

As his benevolent racism proves impervious to the many hints the Spaniards are 

desperately trying to communicate, Delano’s continuous acts of misinterpretation result 

in an utter failure of language. As Lee succinctly puts it, “in ‘Benito Cereno’ no one 

understands anyone” (“Language” 511). Delano perceives Cereno as “apathetic and 

mute” (Melville, “Benito” 53), “too much overcome to speak” (97), talking in “tones so 

frenzied, that none in the boat could understand him” (98), and falling into a “speechless 

faint” (99). The old Spanish sailor splicing cable is unable to communicate the situation 

to Delano because, “as [the negroes] became talkative, he by degrees became mute” (72). 

When trying to broach the subject of payment for help, Delano says to Cereno, “‘pardon 

me, but there is an interference with the full expression of what I have to say to you’” 

(90). Shortly afterward, the narrator states: “After this, nothing more could be said” (91). 

Later, the reader learns that “Captain Delano had intended communicating to Don Benito 

the smaller details” of his assistance, but he decides against it based on Cereno’s behavior 

(95, emphasis added). Throughout Delano’s visit to the San Dominick, Melville sustains a 

trope of troubled and unreliable translation to dramatize how speech fails when cultural 

stereotypes get in the way of perceiving reality.  



 

180 

At first glance, the “gray, surreal world of stasis, non-events, uncertain meanings, 

and dead-end clues,” which Bruce L. Grenberg describes as the setting of “Benito 

Cereno” (158), may seem like an odd addition to a study of travel literature, a genre 

usually associated with vibrant scenery and varied adventure. But Amasa Delano’s 

Narrative clearly belongs to a textual tradition of travel and exploration, and, as Heide 

notes, its “descriptions of commercial relations . . . reflect the United States’ economic 

and imperial interests” (47). Moreover, in its “direct engagement with the destructive 

histories of imperial Spanish America” (Wertheimer 139), “Benito Cereno” continues the 

treatment of colonial linguistic encounters begun in Typee, culminating Melville’s 

critique of translation. Delano’s failed interpretation of nearly everything aboard the San 

Dominick illustrates the danger of assuming an alien culture’s easy translatability. 

Offering a broader critique of Transcendentalism and similar forms of idealism, Melville 

demonstrates the error of viewing language as an index of universal truth. 

 

 Of all of the authors examined in this project, Melville is the only one to 

consistently take the cosmopolitan appreciation of linguistic difference that characterized 

early-nineteenth-century travel to Europe and extend that respect for linguistic difference 

to the non-white, non-Western cultures victimized by American expansionism and other 

forms of European colonialism and imperialism. Typee and Omoo demonstrate how the 

lived experience of linguistic encounter can lead to a recognition of the inherent 

difficulties of cross-cultural communication, at least when undertaken with an open mind 

instead of the imperialist drive of explorers like Columbus. This recognition is the 

essential first step in finding a golden mean between the extremes of too easy 



 

181 

translatability and utter incomprehensibility. As his works become increasingly 

philosophical, Melville develops his critique of cross-cultural communication into a 

demonstration of the inherent incommensurability of language. Finally, in “Benito 

Cereno,” Melville takes the theoretical investigations of language in Mardi and Moby-

Dick and reapplies them to the kind of colonial encounter that was the subject of Typee, 

using the trope of translation to critique U.S. imperialism. For Melville, translation 

generally, but particularly translation in the contexts of colonialism and imperialism, 

reveals the incommensurability of concepts across different languages and cultures, and 

this incommensurability highlights the ideological tint, subjective distortion, and 

downright opacity inherent in language. Thus, Melville’s treatment of language not only 

undermines the discourse of colonialism, it undermines the stability of language more 

generally. Melville decenters linguistic certainty by dramatizing the failures of translation 

endemic to cross-cultural encounter, going beyond a critique of linguistic stereotypes to 

collapse the universal idealism that justifies imperialism’s entire project. By criticizing 

the typical colonialist move of negating the language of the other through the assumption 

of transparent translation, Melville deconstructs the human dependence on sign systems, 

a move that transcends any “us vs. them” dichotomy.



 

182 

CHAPTER 4 

FROM TRAVEL TO TOURISM: THE SHIFT AT MID-CENTURY 

In the 1840s, as the United States was expanding its influence throughout the 

Pacific, and Herman Melville was portraying the sailors who made that expansion 

possible, traveling Americans were also crossing the Atlantic Ocean in ever-increasing 

numbers. Although it would not fully materialize until after the Civil War, the first signs 

of the tourist boom were appearing as new technologies of travel made Europe accessible 

to more than the wealthiest and most culturally elite. The cosmopolitan appreciation of 

European culture evidenced in the works of James Fenimore Cooper began to erode as 

the motivation for and the nature of travel changed. Leisure and depth were being 

replaced by speed and superficiality.  

These changes were often subtle and gradual, and it is impossible to date the rise 

of tourism at any particular moment.
1
 Instead, this chapter will trace the incremental shift 

from cosmopolitans such as Cooper, who valued European languages, to the later 

generations of “ugly American” tourists who would find learning other languages 

unnecessary, or even undesirable. Since the American Revolution, travel’s most frequent 

purposes had been education, business, and politics (W. Stowe 76; Blanton 3). By the end 

of the nineteenth century, however, vastly increased numbers of Americans were 

traveling for pleasure and to acquire the cultural capital of having seen the sights of 

                                                 
1
 The history of American travel and travel literature is the subject of a number of 

insightful and comprehensive studies. For more detail than can be covered here, see in 

particular William W. Stowe’s Going Abroad, James Buzard’s The Beaten Track, Foster 

Rhea Dulles’s Americans Abroad, and Larzer Ziff’s Return Passages. These studies 

differ in the dates they give for the rise of mass tourism, but all trace a similar shift in 

nineteenth-century travel to Europe. 



 

183 

Europe (Dulles 1). The new technology and infrastructure of tourism—faster and less 

expensive transportation, pervasive guides and guidebooks, fixed tours and itineraries, 

and more numerous establishments catering to English-only speakers—made travel more 

accessible, more standardized, and more efficient. This change in the practice of travel 

both encouraged and was encouraged by a change in motive. In contrast to the older 

tradition of the Grand Tour, which promised academic, cultural, and social edification, 

the increasingly common reason for travel was not to gain substantive knowledge and 

experience, but to acquire the cultural capital of merely having been there. 

As the following readings will demonstrate, both the extent to which travel 

literature values foreign language and the way it presents translation are more than 

indicators of this cultural shift. Rather, the traveler’s degree of engagement with foreign 

language contributes to the changing attitudes toward cultural difference in direct and 

significant ways. Michael Cronin offers a succinct but insightful account of this 

connection. He explains, “If travel in the first stage was to facilitate national and 

international relations by making contacts and learning foreign languages, the second 

stage saw a marked preference for the eye over the ear and the increasing predominance 

of sightseeing” (Across 118). This important shift from the ear to the eye, from listening 

to what foreign people have to say to viewing their monuments and quickly moving on, 

puts more emphasis on sight than on understanding. And not only is the failure of 

travelers to speak and understand the local language both a cause and an effect of the 

increasing superficiality of tourism, but it also contributes to how Americans perceived 

the foreign on a more conceptual level. Earlier American travelers went to Europe with 

the expectation of learning something from the differences encountered abroad, but later 



 

184 

travelers’ inability to hear and understand made the foreign land all that more 

intimidating and strange. Isolated by linguistic ignorance, the tourist began to feel more 

like an outsider in an alien world. Rather than seeing Europe as part of America’s cultural 

heritage to be understood and appreciated, European differences became increasingly 

threatening. Moreover, the traveler’s natural defense against the discomfort of the 

uncanny foreign (the fear of the incomprehensible), is to further exalt the customs of 

home. This increased preference for the language and culture of one’s own national 

community makes the traveler less likely to learn the language abroad, further 

heightening the feeling of isolation. 

This chapter will argue that, as European travel became more accessible to the 

middle class, and the numbers of Americans traveling to Europe grew, travelers 

increasingly saw the differences encountered abroad as inferior, and this lack of interest 

in the cultural content of Europe manifested in an increased emphasis on translation, and 

in the loss of cultural specificity that translation entails. To better illustrate the nuances of 

the shift in both travel and travel writing, I will examine several works of Melville 

alongside a broader selection of authors. The first section will argue that the figure of the 

guidebook, as exemplified by Bayard Taylor’s Views A-Foot and dramatized in 

Melville’s Redburn, illuminates the changing nature of European travel while revealing 

how one writer’s experience can model a new set of values for future travelers. In the 

next section, the contrast between Margaret Fuller, who most thoroughly continues the 

cosmopolitan tradition of Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who represents the new 

attitudes of tourism, demonstrates how the changes in popular travel epitomized and 

encouraged by Bayard Taylor affected the experiences of even the United States’ most 



 

185 

celebrated authors. The final section, which examines Melville’s 1856-57 tour of Europe 

and the Levant and the epic poem Clarel inspired by that experience, argues that even 

Melville was not immune from the rise of tourism. Taken together, these writers illustrate 

the varied positions toward linguistic and cultural difference that occurred in the 

transitional period at mid-century, as well as the incremental shift from cosmopolitanism 

to cultural chauvinism that occurred in the progression from travelogue to traveler to 

future guidebooks and to ever-increasing numbers of traveling Americans. 

The Role of the Guidebook in Bayard Taylor and Redburn 

The shifting characteristics of American travel writing in the nineteenth century 

are best illustrated through an examination of one of its most successful authors. Bayard 

Taylor is a perfect example of the new comparative affordability of European travel. 

Views A-Foot (1846), his first and most famous travelogue, also demonstrates how, even 

when less wealthy travelers aspire to the literary elite, their failure to penetrate European 

society becomes the model for future travelers, gradually lowering the expectation of and 

desire for genuine cultural involvement. This gap between Taylor’s aspirations and his 

actual mode of travel exemplifies the incremental decline of cosmopolitanism from text 

to traveler to text. 

Although he is largely unknown today, Bayard Taylor enjoyed immense 

popularity during his extensive career. Despite his aspirations to be considered a great 

poet and author in the ranks of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving, 

Taylor never could escape the public image of a travel writer (Wermuth 30, 157). He 

published nineteen volumes about travel as well as innumerable other works of literature 

and scholarship (see Wermuth 189-91), but none would surpass the popularity of Views 



 

186 

A-Foot. The book documents Taylor’s two-year stay in Europe, and at first glance, his 

route does not seem to differ much from Cooper’s. Taylor first visits England, Ireland, 

and Scotland, travels through Belgium and Heidelberg, and then resides in Frankfurt for 

nearly a year. Taylor’s time in Frankfurt, particularly his account of visiting the 

university students, comes closest to the cosmopolitan experiences of Taylor’s 

predecessors, but the pedestrian tour of Germany, Bohemia, Switzerland, Italy, and 

France that follows, occupying roughly two thirds of the book, is a touristic progression 

of inns, and sights, and scenery.
2
 Not only was the volume one of the most famous 

examples of the genre in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is also a particularly 

representative example, so much so that Paul C. Wermuth calls it “the quintessence of the 

average” (35). In fact, Bruce A. Harvey writes that “Taylor quite likely comes the closest 

to being the most unexceptional travel author of his period” (21). Compared with 

Cooper’s Gleanings in Europe and other earlier writings, Views A-Foot marks the 

beginning of a shift from cosmopolitanism to tourism both in the travelogue genre and in 

the nature of American travel to Europe. 

In 1844, Taylor was only a young man of nineteen when he developed a plan to 

fund a tour of Europe by sending an account of his travels to the New York Tribune. In 

contrast to the previous genteel travelers he sought to imitate, Taylor could afford neither 

a typical Grand Tour nor the college education his extended trip to Europe would replace 

(Wermuth 17). Indeed, as Wermuth reports, Taylor “had, in the best American tradition, 

                                                 
2
 Wermuth is critical of both portions of the trip, noting that, despite Taylor’s “mode of 

travel, he didn’t comment much on the life of ordinary Germans, though he remarked 

about inns, food, or people he met,” and further asserting, “he stayed in Germany a full 

year, and his observations there were not significantly better than elsewhere” (33, 37). 



 

187 

earned the trip all by himself” (29). In this way, Taylor represents the greater accessibility 

of European travel, and indeed, Views A-Foot became one of the original accounts of how 

to do Europe “on the cheap.” Unlike the wealthier classes who had been touring Europe 

for years, Taylor had to earn his money as he traveled and economize whenever he could. 

Lacking both status and means, Taylor was cut off from the high society Cooper enjoyed 

abroad, apparently to his chagrin. Considering himself “an intellectual and a literary man 

who deserved better,” as Wermuth explains, Taylor was “frequently annoyed that his lack 

of money forced him to live mainly with the lower class” (35-36). His walking tour of 

Europe, punctuated with thrifty meals, second-class passages, and inexpensive lodgings, 

rarely penetrated very far into the culture and society that was the previous focus of the 

Grand Tour’s cosmopolitan education. 

Taylor’s situation thus illustrates his transitional status in the changing nature of 

American travel to Europe. On one hand, Taylor’s literary aspirations reflect his desire to 

tour Europe like the cultured and relatively wealthy gentlemen authors of the previous 

decades, who called on European society and visited with major literary and political 

figures. Although Taylor succeeded at least partially in establishing himself as a major 

author, an image he would continue to craft after his return to the U.S. (Wermuth 19), his 

lack of both money and status prevented him from participating in high society as his 

predecessors had done. Instead, he frequently took a spectator’s approach to local culture, 

anticipating the kind of tourism that would dominate after the Civil War. Taylor’s less 

wealthy childhood also limited his linguistic education before the trip. He eventually 

learns German, but his lack of previous education makes his initial experience abroad one 

of linguistic isolation. Although Taylor valued foreign language and culture more than 



 

188 

most of the tourists who follow him, his travelogue records his experiences rather than 

his aspirations. Taylor did not necessarily esteem European culture and language less 

than earlier figures, but his narrative places less emphasis on those things, minimizing 

their importance for the future travelers who would use Views A-Foot as a guidebook. 

Although Taylor’s walking tour was ostensibly more leisurely than the 

increasingly common travel by railroad and steamer, he often passed through places too 

quickly to establish any significant intercourse with the locals, or to observe their culture 

on more than a superficial level. He admits, for example, “With the rapidity usual to 

Americans we have already finished seeing Milan, and shall start to-morrow morning on 

a walk to Genoa” (246). Many previous critics, unintentionally mirroring Cooper’s 

criticism of Dodge’s travel journal in Homeward Bound, have charged Taylor’s account 

with superficiality. Alfred Bendixen, for example, writes that Taylor’s European 

travelogues “are not very good books” and “offer little more than superficial description 

along with the conventional patriotic and anti-Catholic assessments” (118). Likewise, 

Larzer Ziff asserts that “[t]he information he supplies about art and architecture, the 

foreign words he intrudes, the costumes and the manners that catch his eye, do not so 

much accumulate into a picture of European culture as they do into the portrait of a 

young man from rural America validating the culture he had acquired from books read by 

lamplight and dreamed about by day” (Return 125). Taylor’s description of a village on 

his trek through Bohemia and Moravia offers a representative example: 

The third night of our journey we stopped at the little village of Stecken, 

and the next morning, after three hours’ walk over the ridgy heights, 

reached the old Moravian city of Iglau, built on a hill. It happened to be 

Corpus Christi day, and the peasants of the neighborhood were hastening 

there in their gayest dresses. The young women wore a crimson scarf 

around the head, with long fringed and embroidered ends hanging over the 



 

189 

shoulders, or falling in one smooth fold from the back of the head. They 

were attired in black velvet vests, with full white sleeves and skirts of 

some gay color, which were short enough to show to advantage their red 

stockings and polished shoe-buckles. Many of them were not deficient in 

personal beauty—there was a gipsy-like wildness in their eyes, that 

combined with their rich hair and graceful costume, reminded me of the 

Italian maidens. The towns too, with their open squares and arched 

passages, have quite a southern look; but the damp, gloomy weather was 

enough to dispel any illusion of this kind. (151) 

As Ziff’s analysis suggests, such descriptions of scenery, climate, and dress seem to offer 

readers an experience of seeing these foreign lands, but this vision rarely penetrates 

below the surface, and the content rarely moves beyond amusing curiosities and 

charming bits of local color. Like the typical tourist, Taylor not only sees rather than 

understands, but he often sees only what he has come expecting to see, doing little to 

challenge his own expectations or to change the preconceived notions of his readers.  

Another marker of Americans’ changing attitudes toward cultural difference is 

Taylor’s treatment of American letters. Taylor’s literary aspirations may align him with 

earlier, cosmopolitan figures, but he proves more interested in elevating the status of his 

own culture than in learning from the experience of being abroad. He emphasizes his 

interest in American literature by repeatedly alluding to the fame American authors have 

gained in Europe. For example, Taylor describes a publisher in Leipsic, Otto Wigan, who 

“has already published Prescott and Bancroft, and . . . intends giving out shortly, 

translations from some of our poets and novelists,” as well as a “young German author” 

who is “well versed in our literature” and “is now engaged in translating American 

works” (128). In addition to Taylor’s clear interest in the progress of American letters 

and their reception in Europe, another example of the writer’s literary aspirations can be 

found in his meeting with “Freiligrath, the poet, who was lately banished from Germany 



 

190 

on account of the liberal principles his last volume contains” (224). Taylor reports that 

they “conversed much upon American literature” and describes Freiligrath as “a warm 

admirer of Bryant and Longfellow [who] has translated many of their poems into 

German” (224). On one hand, this literary meeting echoes Cooper’s encounters with Sir 

Walter Scott, although Taylor lacks the degree of fame enjoyed by the earlier figures, and 

he needed a letter from Nathaniel Parker Willis to obtain the meeting (225). At the same 

time, by turning the conversation to American literature instead of learning more about 

Freiligrath’s German poetry and politics, Taylor shows that he is more invested in 

furthering the esteem of his own country’s cultural production than in learning about 

Europe. Rather than aiming to become a member of a cosmopolitan intellectual 

community in order to learn from its foreign members, Taylor proves more interested in 

staking a claim for his own country, changing foreign views of America instead of his 

own views of the foreign. 

Taylor’s nationalistic leanings are bolstered by his initial ignorance of foreign 

languages. First arriving on the continent, he describes an “agreeable and yet a painful 

sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and 

manners are different from one’s own” (46). Despite Taylor’s excitement at the prospect 

of finally exploring Europe, with its “old buildings . . . linked with many a stirring 

association of past history,” he admits that “the want of a communication with the living 

world about, walls one up with a sense of loneliness he could not before have conceived” 

(46). Like Cooper and previous American travelers, Taylor stands in awe of Europe’s 

deeper cultural history, but his lack of linguistic education prevents him from becoming a 

part of the scene he admires. Perhaps to minimize the isolation caused by his own 



 

191 

linguistic inadequacy, Taylor turns to observations of “the endless sound of wooden 

shoes clattering over the rough pavements, and people talking in that most unmusical of 

all languages, low Dutch” (47). Rather than dwelling on his own inability to fully 

understand and experience Europe’s deeper culture and history, Taylor thus turns both 

local language and custom into anecdotal and quaint local color. Further anticipating the 

later mode of touristic travel, Taylor must hire a guide, “engaged because he spoke a few 

words of English” (48). Because of his monolingualism, Taylor’s first view of the 

continent is through the eyes of a tourist.
3
 

In Heidelberg, Taylor begins to reduce his initial isolation from European culture 

by learning the language. At first, he once again presents foreign language as local color 

when he describes his “polite and talkative landlady,” who “much amused” Taylor and 

his travel companion with “her endeavors to make [them] understand” (61). Taylor adds, 

“As if to convey her meaning plainer, she raises both thumbs and forefingers to her 

mouth and pulls out the words like a long string; her tongue goes so fast that it keeps my 

mind always on a painful stretch to comprehend an idea here and there” (61). This almost 

grotesque description of the woman pulling a string of words out of her mouth, tongue 

wagging at lightning speed, makes speaking German seem more like a carnival trick than 

an intellectual pursuit. Nevertheless, Taylor demonstrates his legitimate interest in 

learning German by taking formal lessons (61). And, as Ziff notes, Taylor’s extended 

residence in Germany does lead to his eventual mastery of the language and life-long 

                                                 
3
 Nevertheless, Buzard finds that most travelers seek to differentiate themselves from the 

common rabble of superficial tourists to which they inevitably belong (6), and Taylor is 

no exception. Thus, despite Taylor’s own reliance upon guides and guidebooks, he 

criticizes “[t]he English tourists” who “sat and read about the very towns and towers they 

were passing, scarcely lifting their eyes to the real scenes” (Taylor 54). 



 

192 

study of its literature (Return 123), although this seriousness is far more evident across a 

broad consideration of Taylor’s career than in Views A-Foot. After his initial “tough 

grapple” with the German language, Taylor demonstrates his dedication when he reports, 

“I am just beginning to master the language, and it seems so necessary to devote every 

minute to study, that I would rather undergo some privation, than neglect turning these 

fleeting hours into gold” (89). Despite his cosmopolitan motives, the metaphor Taylor 

uses here suggests the general shift in American attitudes toward travel. The decision to 

learn a language has become an economic one, and Taylor demonstrates his monetary 

preoccupation by describing linguistic education as a conversion of time to gold. Over 

time, the initially practical decision to avoid the expense of foreign language education 

would grow into an aversion on principle. 

Even after learning German, Taylor does not seem to enjoy the experience of 

immersion in a foreign language, and he portrays it as an unpleasant necessity rather than 

an invaluable opportunity. In his account of listening to “Strauss’s band” in Vienna, 

Taylor describes how the Viennese “talked and laughed sociably together between the 

pauses of the music, or strolled up and down the lighted alleys” (161-62). He reports, 

“We walked up and down with them, and thought how much we should enjoy such a 

scene at home, where the faces around us would be those of friends, and the language our 

mother tongue!” (162-63). Although Taylor is experiencing some of the best of European 

culture, and he can speak German well enough for a passport inspector to mistake him for 

an Austrian (169), he would still prefer the company of his countrymen, and even more 

tellingly, the sound of his native language. Such homesickness is certainly 

understandable, but the frequency with which Taylor notes his sense of isolation 



 

193 

bespeaks a far lesser degree of comfort abroad than earlier writers describe. Other foreign 

languages seem even more daunting than German. Throughout the account, Taylor 

mentions his difficulties with Bohemian (145), Italian (238), Provençal (347), and French 

(348). These frequent complaints convey to his readers a sense of discomfort with both 

foreign language and culture that becomes ingrained in the model experience. Upon 

returning to England at the end of his continental tour, Taylor rejoices, “my tongue would 

now be freed from the difficult bondage of foreign languages, and my ears be rejoiced 

with the music of my own” (375). Despite his developing skill with German, foreign 

language ranks, for Taylor, among the annoyances of travel. And its inconvenience looms 

far larger than any intellectual or cultural edification that being immersed in the foreign 

might provide.  

Although Taylor achieves the older ideal of cosmopolitan travel at least in part, he 

constructs his own text so that it will guide future travelers further down the path to 

tourism and linguistic isolationism. The success of Views A-Foot was not diminished by 

“the sheer superficiality of its observations,” but as Wermuth suggests, Taylor’s practice 

of “never penetrat[ing] very far into anything” may have attributed to its popularity (37). 

Indeed, the volume became a guidebook for subsequent tourists, and Taylor increased its 

value as a manual by appending “Advice and Information for Pedestrians” to its eighth 

edition (Wermuth 35). Taylor furthers the progress of tourism when he suggests 

“[t]raveling with a vetturino” so that “the tourist is freed from the annoyance of 

quarrelling with cheating landlords” (315). After engaging such a guide to make all of the 

arrangements for food and lodging, the tourist need not worry about learning enough 

Italian to procure these necessities for himself. Consequently, not only does Taylor offer 



 

194 

readers a comparatively superficial account of his own travels, but he advises them to 

seek even more efficiency abroad, encouraging convenience and the added superficiality 

that such convenience brings.  

As if further promoting the removal of all foreign language from travel, Taylor 

goes on to state that “[a] translation of our written contract, will best explain this mode of 

traveling” (315). Like the vetturino he recommends, Taylor seeks to ease the difficulties 

of travel for the reader by eliminating the need to understand the local language. In fact, 

with its greater accessibility to the less wealthy and consequently less educated, the 

democratization of European travel mirrors both the act of translation and the way that 

any travelogue “translates” the foreign into a text that can be perused from one’s own 

parlor. On one hand, the increased access to the foreign provided by less expensive 

travel, literary translation, and travel writing seems to broaden America’s cultural 

horizons, and for the many who would have had no access otherwise, this is at least 

partially the case. But on the other hand, as Cooper emphasizes in his own travel writing, 

the act of translation tends to dilute the cultural content of the foreign text, eliding 

difference and homogenizing human experience. In much the same way, Taylor’s travel 

writing, as well as the translations it contains, provides access to more people, but only in 

a diluted form. And over time, as those who use Taylor’s writing as a guide mistake this 

mediation for the full experience, the aims of travel constrict, decreasing the level of 

cultural involvement future generations both desire and achieve.  

The vetturino contract is one in a series of translations of poems and other texts 

throughout Taylor’s account. For example, Taylor presents his readers with his 

translation of one of Freiligrath’s poems, “as a specimen of the spirit in which they are 



 

195 

written” (80). While Taylor explicitly marks the act of translation in this example, he 

over-optimistically suggests that his own version could replicate the German’s “spirit” of 

the original. When Taylor describes a gathering of German students singing the 

“‘Landsfather’ or consecration song,” he presents the text in English without mentioning 

that the lyrics must have been translated (84-86). The English verses, interspersed with 

Taylor’s matter-of-fact explanations of the ceremony of drinking, clashing swords, and 

piercing caps, give the illusion of fully explaining everything, translating the ritual for 

readers so that they will not have to learn enough to decipher such a scene themselves. 

Similarly, in his description of the Austrian Alps, Taylor includes a translation of the 

ballad “The Mountain Boy.” The first stanza gives a sense of the piece’s general tone: 

A herd-boy on the mountain’s brow,  

I see the castles all below.  

The sunbeam here is earliest cast  

And by my side it lingers last— 

I am the boy of the mountain! (188) 

As in the previous examples, Taylor presents translation as both desirable and 

unproblematic. In all of these cases, Taylor positions himself as the gatekeeper of foreign 

language. Just as he suggests to readers that a good guidebook can replace a courier 

(391), Taylor acts as a translator of local language and culture so that his readers need not 

develop more than a passing acquaintance with them. 

Moreover, Taylor’s later study of German literature (see Wermuth 20), and his 

translation of Goethe’s Faust, further demonstrate how Taylor discourages readers from 

learning foreign languages by acting as their cultural mediator and “guide” to the foreign. 

In his Faust, Taylor attempts to replicate both the content and versification of Goethe’s 

original, believing that there are “few difficulties in the way of a nearly literal yet 



 

196 

thoroughly rhythmical version of Faust” (Taylor qtd. Haskell 22). As Juliana Haskell 

demonstrates, however, because German words tend to be longer than English ones (in 

addition to other intrinsic differences between the languages), register suffers when 

content and form are held equivalent, and Taylor is forced to pad his lines with 

superfluous syllables (Haskell 38-41). The result is what one contemporary review called 

“Latinized words and literary phrases,” which deviate from the direct simplicity of 

Goethe’s German (Andrews qtd. Haskell 39). Taylor’s translation thus gives the 

appearance of a perfect substitute for the original when it is really an inferior version. Just 

as in the discourse of imperialism examined in the previous chapters, Taylor assumes that 

translation can be more straightforward than is possible, demonstrating a failure to 

understand and appreciate the original language and culture. The impression of 

equivalence is heightened further by one of Taylor’s stated principles of translation, the 

“abnegation of the translator’s personality through which alone the original author can 

receive justice” (Taylor qtd. Haskell 19). Taylor’s aim of concealing the translator’s work 

lulls the reader into thinking that this is Goethe in English. Not only does the mediation 

of translation lose some of the qualities of the original, but that loss is concealed from the 

reader.
4
  

Of course no translation is perfect, but Taylor’s exaggerated claims of 

equivalence present his Faust as a perfect substitute for the original rather than a 

                                                 
4
 Such a practice would lead to Emerson’s claim to not “hesitate to read . . . all good 

books, in translations” because “what is really best in any book is translatable” (Society 

182). 



 

197 

compromise between content and accessibility.
5
 Haskell highlights this fault when she 

concludes that Taylor’s Faust fails to “perform that higher office of a good translation, so 

potently to suggest the charm of the original as to win readers for Goethe in the German” 

(89). Because no person can learn all of the world’s languages, translation is a necessary 

and culturally valuable method of bringing new literatures to those who cannot read the 

originals. Nevertheless, Taylor’s fault, in his travel writing as in his translation, is that his 

translations of both culture and text do not encourage readers to learn more or to 

experience the originals directly. Instead, Taylor subtly but pervasively discourages 

readers from stepping outside their monolingual world. For example, a description of 

Taylor from the New York Evening Post explains, “As a journalist it was his business to 

make his learning vicarious; he observed and studied that other men might know” (qtd. 

Haskell 83). By extension, although Taylor modeled his travel on his cosmopolitan, 

literary predecessors, he learned German so that his readers would not have to. 

Wermuth’s analysis of Taylor’s popular German literature lectures in the 1870s also 

demonstrates how the erudite writer encouraged monolingualism in his readers and 

students by making his subject seem too accessible.
6
 While Taylor unquestionably 

provided more knowledge of German culture to his audiences than they might otherwise 

                                                 
5
 Wermuth defends the Faust translation, even calling it “Taylor’s most important work,” 

and he disagrees with Haskell’s overwhelmingly negative conclusions, if not the 

particular faults she analyzes (156-60). 

6
 According to Wermuth, these lectures, which usually included a summary of the 

author’s life and work accompanied by translations of “some passages to give the flavor,” 

were so popular because “such was Taylor’s skill that he was able to make these early 

essays interesting to those who knew little of German literature. Taylor had the ability, 

from his journalistic experience, to pick out the salient features of material and to 

eliminate the rest” (168-69). 



 

198 

have had, he simultaneously gave the impression that this was all there was to know, 

implicitly discouraging further study. In much the same way, although a lifetime of study 

converted the ignorant youth who first landed in Liverpool into a scholar of German 

language and literature, both his travel writing and his translation mediate his own 

knowledge and experience for a popular audience, implicitly discouraging readers from 

deeper cultural experiences abroad while concealing that any cultural content may be 

missing. 

 

Melville addresses the increasing superficiality of travel encouraged by Taylor in 

Redburn (1849), a novel conspicuously missing from the previous chapter’s account of 

Melville’s early career. Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and Moby-Dick all draw on the author’s 

Pacific whaling experiences from 1841 to 1844 (Heflin xxiii). In contrast, Redburn, 

Melville’s fourth novel, is loosely based on his first voyage, a trip between New York 

and Liverpool on the merchant vessel St. Lawrence in 1839 (Heflin 4-5). In the novel, the 

young and inexperienced Wellingborough Redburn fulfills his longing to go to sea by 

enlisting on a similar transatlantic voyage—blundering over the customs and 

responsibilities of a sailor, seeing a bit of Liverpool, and making a strange nocturnal trip 

to London with his English friend Harry Bolton before returning home. While many 

critics have taken Melville’s claim to have written Redburn for the money as a reason to 

disregard it, several have recognized its significance.
7
 Some of the most interesting 

                                                 
7
 William H. Gilman, for example, defends the novel against those who “look upon it as 

mere apprenticeship,” and he includes among its “merits” a “tender and varied depiction 

of the woes of a disappointed adolescent” and “a penetrating psychological realism and a 

true pathos” (247). Gilman’s reading is an example of those that focus on the 



 

199 

readings view the novel as a critique of America. Marvin Fisher argues that “Melville 

was already a subversive writer in Redburn,” and that the targets of his critique included 

not only religious and economic systems but “those qualities in the American character 

that abetted moral hypocrisy and an impoverished imagination” (49-50). Paul Giles calls 

Redburn “the most straightforward example of cross-cultural critique” in Melville’s 

works and examines how “stereotypes are dismantled and Liverpool comes to seem more 

like New York than Redburn has supposed” (56-57). Such readings recognize that 

Redburn participates in travel literature’s common purpose of giving new context to 

domestic issues through the experience of the foreign. Redburn’s experiences, those of a 

common sailor rather than a tourist, provide an interesting counterpoint to the superficial, 

guidebook-dependent travel of Taylor and his successors. Wellingborough Redburn and 

Bayard Taylor share the common experience of leaving America at an early age, 

dependent upon themselves for support, to see first-hand a land they have only dreamed 

about and studied in books. But for Redburn, the experience of travel also brings a new 

understanding of linguistic and cultural difference.
8
  

 Redburn initially views linguistic difference as a mark of foreign exoticism. As a 

child, when he fantasizes about his father’s travels, he thinks, “And who could be going 

to Bremen? No one but foreigners, doubtless; men of dark complexions and jet-black 

                                                                                                                                                 

psychological and biographical implications of Melville’s characterization of 

Wellingborough Redburn. 

8
 The similarity of Taylor’s motives to Redburn’s youthful fantasies is apparent in the 

opening chapter to Views A-Foot: Taylor explains his childhood dreams of visiting 

Europe to “behold the scenes, among which [his] fancy had so long wandered,” and 

despite his “want of means” admits, “I could not content myself to wait until I had slowly 

accumulated so large a sum as tourists usually spend on their travels” (1). 



 

200 

whiskers, who talked French” (4). For young Redburn, not only is speaking French akin 

to the surface differences of complexion and facial hair, but these men “talked” not 

“spoke” French. The youth does not care for the content of their speech, it is only 

meaningless talk with the same effect as exotic mustaches.
9
 Similarly, Redburn describes 

his wish to read one of his father’s French books: “I wondered what a great man I would 

be, if by foreign travel I should ever be able to read straight along without stopping, out 

of that book, which now was a riddle to every one in the house but my father” (7). The 

possibility of learning the language at home does not seem to cross his mind because 

French only interests him as a marker of having been to Europe, as just another 

souvenir.
10

 For young Redburn, knowing French has value only as evidence of being 

well-traveled.  

In contrast to these early fantasies of foreign language as a symbol of the cultural 

capital of having been to foreign lands, Redburn’s experiences as a sailor give him a new 

perspective on linguistic alterity. When he first boards the Highlander, Redburn finds 

himself puzzled, not by the exciting European languages he fantasized about as a child, 

but by strange varieties of English. Melville thus continues the exploration of nautical 

jargon found in Cooper’s sea tales. When the first sailor Redburn meets asks, “have you 

got your traps aboard?” the youth, confused, reveals his ignorance by replying that he 

                                                 
9
 In his discussion of Redburn’s growing understanding of alterity, Emory Elliott 

similarly examines how Redburn’s childhood daydreaming “reveals his inherent sense 

that the cultural ‘other’ will be linguistically and racially exotic and mysterious” (22). 

10
 That Redburn is more interested in what being able to read French represents than in 

the content of the French book is also suggested by Peter J. Bellis’s psychological 

reading, in which both Redburn’s father’s travel and his knowledge of French symbolize 

“[t]he father’s authority” (56). 



 

201 

“didn’t know there were any rats in the ship, and hadn’t brought any ‘trap’” (24). Shortly 

after, Redburn hears a “curious language . . . half English and half gibberish,” whose 

speaker turns out to be only “an English boy, from Lancashire” (26). As Melville will 

make even clearer as the novel progresses, the disorienting yet enriching experience of 

linguistic alterity is not had through the superficial kind of travel Redburn fantasized 

about as a child, the travel sought and described by Taylor, but through the genuinely 

cosmopolitan experience of shipboard life.  

The voyage to Liverpool is filled with similar misunderstandings as Redburn 

slowly learns the business of sailing and its accompanying terminology. Redburn 

explains of the “puzzling and confounding” experience of sailing for the first time:  

It must be like going into a barbarous country, where they speak a strange 

dialect, and dress in strange clothes, and live in strange houses. For sailors 

have their own names, even for things that are familiar ashore; and if you 

call a thing by its shore name, you are laughed at for an ignoramus and a 

land-lubber. (65) 

Still uninitiated in the complexities of a sailor’s work, Redburn has the same lack of 

appreciation for nautical terminology that he does for foreign languages. Redburn’s 

comparison of sailors’ jargon to “a strange dialect,” like his later observation of 

“outlandish Dutch gibberish” (76), reduces foreign speech to content-less 

unintelligibility. As he gains sailing experience, however, Redburn learns the same lesson 

demonstrated in Cooper’s The Pilot. As Peter J. Bellis notes, “Where the boy’s father had 

mastered French, he must now learn the ‘Greek’ of sailing terminology,” and “learning 

this new language is equated with learning the skills the words describe” (58). Strange 

words, such as the obscure nautical jargon of his ship, are valuable for the meaning they 

convey; they are more than colorful aspects of foreign scenery. Redburn begins to 



 

202 

demonstrate this growing awareness when he notes that “the mere knowing of the names 

of the ropes, and familiarizing yourself with their places” are but “things which a 

beginner of ordinary capacity soon masters,” while “[t]he business of a thorough-bred 

sailor is a special calling” that demands much “adroitness” and “versatility of talent” 

(120). As Redburn gains some of his first worldly experience, he begins to recognize the 

extraordinary skill required to manage a ship. Redburn further learns that the sailors’ 

technical terminology is not superfluous obfuscation but, as David Simpson argued of 

Cooper’s nautical language, it is a precise system for designating particular and 

indispensable actions while avoiding the delay a more extensive explanation in land-

English would cause (Politics 199). Nautical jargon is not, as Redburn first believed of 

his father’s French, difference for difference’s sake, but a legitimate language conveying 

specific and vital information. 

In addition to his growing appreciation for the value of linguistic difference, 

Redburn gains a more mature perspective on his childhood fantasies through his 

disillusionment with his father’s guidebook, The Picture of Liverpool.
11

 This sequence is 

one of Melville’s most pointed critiques of the growing practice of tourism. Melville 

                                                 
11

 Critics have read the guidebook as a symbol of Redburn’s disillusionment with his 

father (Sten, Weaver 107), of his youthful religious faith (L. Thompson 84; M. Smith 32), 

and of his naive trust in textuality (Weinstein 379). Lawrence Buell focuses particularly 

on Redburn’s travel to England when he describes Redburn’s disillusionment with the 

guidebook as part of “Redburn’s attempt to decolonize himself, to shake off the inbred 

genteel Anglophilia that initially makes him a maladroit sailor and leads to a pathetically 

naive pilgrimage in his father’s footsteps through Liverpool” (“Question” 222). Phyllis 

Cole likewise describes how Melville replaces the tradition of travel to “picturesque 

England” with an image of “an England closer to the negative image of the democratic 

nationalistic tradition” (297, 317). Ian S. Maloney makes a connection between travel and 

language when he compares the guidebook to Redburn’s father’s equally “useless” 

volumes in French (79). 



 

203 

signals his clear condemnation of Redburn’s obsession with the book in the chapter 

heading “Redburn Grows Intolerably Flat and Stupid over Some Outlandish Old Guide-

Books” (141). Although Redburn assiduously studies the minutest details of the book that 

guided his father through Liverpool, printed fifty years before, all of the landmarks he 

seeks are gone. On one hand, as Redburn’s experiences emphasize the passage of time—

he laments, for example, that the book is “nearly half a century behind the age! and no 

more fit to guide me about the town, than the map of Pompeii” (157)—Melville calls 

attention to the changes in travel to Europe. At the same time, Melville implies that all 

guidebooks are inherently unfit and that a traveler is better served experiencing a place 

anew instead of cleaving to old texts. Redburn tells himself: 

And, Wellingborough, as your father’s guide-book is no guide for you, 

neither would yours (could you afford to buy a modern one to-day) be a 

true guide to those who come after you. Guide-books, Wellingborough, 

are the least reliable books in all literature; and nearly all literature, in one 

sense, is made up of guide-books. (157) 

As Taylor observed of the “European tourists” who barely see the sights because of their 

absorption by guidebooks (see note 3), and as Tommo experiences on Nukuhiva, an over-

reliance on past texts prevents a real engagement with the world.
12

 Guidebook in hand, 

one can tour the globe without becoming a jot more worldly. 

John Samson adds an interesting economic aspect to this analysis of the failed 

guidebook when he argues that Redburn’s “dreams of following the footsteps of genteel 

travelers to Europe” are “subverted . . . by the reality of a laissez-faire economic system 

that recognizes no superiority but financial” (9). Samson thus joins Benjamin S. West 

                                                 
12

 John Samson also connects Redburn with Tommo in that both “narrator[s have] been 

reading misleading narratives” (9). 



 

204 

(165) and Jeffrey Hotz (“Out” 118) in reading in Redburn what West calls “Melville’s 

Critique of Capitalism.” Indeed, the novel’s economic criticism is linked to its critique of 

tourism. Phyllis Cole describes the resentment Melville held for the easy success of 

Bayard Taylor, that “Taylor is able to do everything he wants, to see the whole Continent 

and lack ‘no necessary comfort,’ whereas Melville’s hero is really poor and therefore 

trapped for six weeks in Liverpool” (320-21). While travelers such as Taylor seem to be 

participating in the democratization of an activity that was once the exclusive domain of 

the very rich, Melville offers a truly democratized alternative, pointing out that the 

middle class to which Taylor belongs is far more privileged than the majority of people 

Redburn encounters. Moreover, by critiquing the poor conditions of industrialized 

England, Melville further emphasizes the superficiality of the pleasant and picturesque 

sights visited by tourists. As Shirley Foster explains, the “horrific sight of urban squalor 

and deprivation” found in Redburn is off of the “well-worn tourist paths” to which most 

travelers confined themselves (“Confusion” 131). Even as tourism makes European travel 

more accessible to the middle class, it still remains a leisure activity available only to the 

privileged minority, and the pervasive poverty produced by the same system of 

capitalism that sustains tourism is too often eclipsed by tourism’s superficial attention to 

quaint local color. 

Melville’s ongoing critique of the system of transnational exchange that supports 

this inequity— evidenced in Mardi’s maker of idols and further explored through Moby-

Dick’s doubloon— continues in his account of Redburn’s merchant voyage. One scene 

that particularly emphasizes economic incommensurability is Redburn’s nightmarish visit 

to a London gambling house with Harry Bolton. Bellis offers this fascinating reading: 



 

205 

Chips are substitutes for money, which is itself a substitute for real goods; 

and these signifiers, doubly removed from their referents, are then 

surrendered to the play of chance. Gambling, in this sense, represents a 

fundamental dissolution of the signifying order, and Harry, as a 

compulsive gambler, embodies this instability. (89) 

Harry’s gambling mirrors the larger-scale speculation of international trade, and both 

allow participants to play with conventions of equivalence for monetary gain, often at the 

expense of the unwary. In Redburn as in Mardi and Moby-Dick, Melville’s play with the 

slippery signification of language accompanies a similar examination of the inherent 

incommensurability of economic systems and of the injustice caused when one party 

takes advantage of the imperfect translation of value across countries and cultures. 

Despite the failure of his guidebook, Redburn’s travels do make him more 

worldly, but Melville is careful to show that Redburn does not gain his newfound 

cosmopolitanism through sight-seeing and the usual itinerary of a tourist. Instead, 

Redburn’s experiences demonstrate that the benefits of speaking to a variety of people, 

such as the sailors found at the Liverpool docks, far surpass any worldliness gained from 

seeing the notable sights. At first, Redburn despairs that his “prospects of seeing the 

world as a sailor [are], after all, but very doubtful,” because sailors “would dream as little 

of traveling inland to see Kenilworth, or Blenheim Castle, as they would of sending a car 

overland to the Pope, when they touched at Naples” (133-34). Redburn initially views a 

sailor’s travels as “go[ing] round the world, without going into it” (133), but he learns 

from his experience with the guidebook that seeing such sights can be far more 

superficial than he imagined, that touring is not really “going into” the world at all. At the 

same time, after returning to the docks from his failed touring, Redburn realizes that there 

is more of the world there than he previously thought: 



 

206 

Surrounded by its broad belt of masonry, each Liverpool dock is a walled 

town, full of life and commotion; or rather, it is a small archipelago, an 

epitome of the world, where all the nations of Christendom, and even 

those of Heathendom, are represented. For, in itself, each ship is an island, 

a floating colony of the tribe to which it belongs. (165)
13

 

While tourists like Taylor can travel a continent without experiencing much of the true 

nature or daily life of its inhabitants, a common sailor can more fully experience 

international differences when diverse people are drawn together in the varied microcosm 

of shipboard life. Redburn learns that speaking with such people is a better way to 

experience the world than following the “beaten track” of a tourist’s itinerary, thus 

providing a counter-example to the ongoing replacement of understanding with sight. 

Strolling along the docks, Redburn encounters a ship from Bombay. He first 

describes its sailors as “chattering like magpies in Hindostanee” (171), but when he takes 

time to converse with one who “spoke good English, and was quite communicative” 

(172), Redburn realizes that these chattering Asians might have something to say: 

So instructive was his discourse, that when we parted, I had considerably 

added to my stock of knowledge. . . . If you want to learn romance, or gain 

an insight into things quaint, curious, and marvelous, drop your books of 

travel, and take a stroll along the docks of a great commercial port. Ten to 

one, you will encounter Crusoe himself among the crowds of mariners 

from all parts of the globe. (172) 

Here, Melville clearly contrasts the false worldliness Redburn thought he could gain from 

guidebooks and tourism to the real cosmopolitanism of a sailor’s life. While Redburn’s 

initial impressions of the multilingualism of the ship led him to belittle any language 

                                                 
13

 Robert T. Tally, Jr., calls Redburn’s view of the Liverpool docks “a figure for 

internationalism and even postnationalism” and argues that, although “Melville utters his 

most famous comment about the specifically American nationality . . . , he rejects that 

there is such a thing, arguing that the national identity of the United States can only be 

viewed in its fundamentally multinational character” (37). 



 

207 

difference that was not a mark of having traveled, the young sailor learns by the return 

voyage that the multilingual ship-board environment represents a truer cosmopolitan 

ideal than he could gain from superficial touring. As these examples demonstrate, 

Melville’s appreciation of foreign language in Redburn does not differ drastically from 

his treatment of language difference discussed in the previous chapter, but the change of 

setting allows his focus to shift from a critique of imperialism to a critique of the rise of 

tourism. As in his Pacific writings, Melville once again maintains his unusually 

cosmopolitan attitude toward “savage” cultures as well as toward the foreign cultures of 

Europe. Unfortunately, this openness to difference remains the exception. In later 

decades, the cultures and languages of Europe increasingly are treated with the level of 

disrespect previously reserved for non-Western peoples. 

Travel and Translation in Fuller and Stowe 

Thus far, my study of American travel has focused regrettably, if necessarily, on 

male authors, but by mid-century, women were traveling to Europe with increased 

frequency, and many wrote about their travels in some form (S. Wright). There have 

already been a number of studies of women’s travel writing, much of which either 

remained in private journals and correspondence or was originally written as such and 

then published later.
14

 While Taylor and Redburn (and the young Melville on whom 

Redburn is loosely based) traveled with a level of anonymity typical for most Americans 

                                                 
14

 See, for example, Helen Barolini’s Their Other Side, Annamaria Formichella Elsden’s 

Roman Fever, Cheryl J. Fish’s Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives, Sara Mills’s 

Discourses of Difference, Susan L. Roberson’s Antebellum American Women Writers and 

the Road, Mary Suzanne Schriber’s Writing Home, and Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman’s 

Traveling Economies. 



 

208 

abroad, this section will return to the travels of more famed and established authors by 

examining two writers who eagerly accepted a more public persona, Margaret Fuller and 

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although these women traveled to Europe within a decade of 

each other, Fuller between 1846 and 1850 and Stowe in 1853, their published travel 

writings demonstrate how the changes epitomized and encouraged by travelogues and 

guides like Views A-Foot affected the European travel of more famous American authors. 

When examined in contrast to Fuller, who continues the tradition of literary cosmopolites 

like Cooper and Washington Irving, Stowe demonstrates how the shift from cultured 

traveler to tourist influenced even the most renowned literary celebrities, a class that was 

once the core of American cosmopolitanism.  

Margaret Fuller is easily one of the most cosmopolitan figures of the antebellum 

period. From a very young age, she received extensive education in both modern and 

classical languages, and she could read Latin, Greek, French, and Italian by the age of 

eight (Durning 56). Like Taylor, but to a greater extent, Fuller was also a translator. Her 

first two published books were translations of Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations 

with Goethe and “Bettina von Arnim’s correspondence with the poet Karoline von 

Günderode” (Durning 20-21). Fuller also translated Goethe’s Torquanto Tasso, although 

it was not published until after her death (101). Indeed, Russell E. Durning’s book 

Margaret Fuller, Citizen of the World is dedicated to analyzing Fuller’s engagement with 

the languages and literatures of Europe and her role “in making European literature 

known in America” (14). Charles Capper, too, calls Fuller “one of America’s first truly 



 

209 

cosmopolitan intellectuals” (xiii).
15

 Not surprisingly, when offered the opportunity to 

travel to Europe with friends in 1846, Fuller eagerly embraced the opportunity (Murray 

281). Like Taylor, Fuller funded her travels, in part, by writing letters for the New York 

Tribune.
16

 She began her trip in England, visited Paris, and then remained in Italy until 

1850, witnessing the unsuccessful Italian revolution of 1847-48.
17

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe traveled to Europe for the first time in 1853, after the 

record-breaking success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Hedrick 233). She spent the first part of 

the trip in England and Scotland, where she toured antislavery societies. Due to what 

Joan D. Hedrick calls “women’s enforced retirement from public speech,” Stowe herself 

did not speak at these meetings, but her husband (Calvin) or her brother (Charles) 

delivered speeches she had written, and sometimes Calvin composed his own (Hedrick 

                                                 
15

 Bell Gale Chevigny describes Fuller’s shifting balance between nationalism and 

cosmopolitanism, arguing that, at first, Fuller’s “growing Italianization deepened and 

sharpened her Americanness[,]. . . enabl[ing] her to discover how Italian and American 

concerns were actually married, and to better identify America’s peculiar needs” (107). 

However, Chevigny argues that Fuller’s focus on American concerns shifted as Fuller 

rejected the “myth of America’s unique destiny” and “urged instead an egalitarian 

cosmopolitanism, which would reposition America morally as one nation among many” 

(110). 

16
 After her death, Fuller’s brother Arthur B. Fuller collected much of her travel writing 

in At Home and Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe (1856). I will 

use the modern and more complete edition of Fuller’s Tribune letters, “These Sad but 

Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846-1850 (Yale UP, 1991). 

17
 Famously, during these years in Italy, Fuller also became involved with Giovanni 

Angelo Ossoli, conceived a child, and likely married the Italian in secret. When they 

finally decided to return to America, their ship was wrecked less than a mile away from 

Fire Island, New York. Fuller refused to attempt to swim to shore, and the entire family 

drowned. This fascinating personal history can be found in Fuller’s private 

correspondence, but it plays little role in the Tribune dispatches, which are the subject of 

my reading. See Meg McGavran Murray’s biography, Margaret Fuller: Wandering 

Pilgrim, for more details of Fuller’s dramatic final years. 



 

210 

242; Foster, “Construction” 151-52). The result of this arrangement was that Stowe’s 

husband drew all negative criticism in the partisan world of antislavery societies, while 

“the public could attribute its most cherished views to [Harriet] without any evidence to 

contradict them” (Hedrick 242). Exhausted by the constant criticism, Stowe’s husband 

returned to the states while his wife continued with the rest of her party to tour the 

continent. After returning home, Stowe collected, edited, or composed a series of 

“letters” which she combined with sections of her brother’s journal and transcripts of the 

various speeches given in her honor; the result is Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands 

(1854) (Foster, “Construction” 152-53). Like Views A-Foot, Stowe’s travelogue became a 

guidebook for large numbers of traveling Americans (S. Wright). 

Comparing Fuller’s Tribune dispatches with Sunny Memories reveals a clear 

decrease in cultural involvement from Fuller to Stowe, a difference which is indicative of 

the general, if gradual, shift from Cooper’s travel to Twain’s tourism. Fuller helps 

illustrate this change when she outlines what she sees as the three types of American 

travelers. In contrast to the extremes of the “servile American,” who without reflection 

puts whatever is fashionable in Europe above anything at home, and the “conceited 

American,” who finds nothing worthwhile abroad in comparison to his own provincial 

tastes, Fuller praises “[t]he thinking American—a man who, recognizing the immense 

advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil, yet does not wish one seed 

from the Past to be lost” (162-63). Fuller’s ideal relation to Europe is an appreciation of 

what is valuable both in the future of America and in the European past, the golden mean 

of this spectrum, and a fair description of Cooper’s cosmopolitanism. All three positions 

might exist at any point in the history of American travel, but while early travelers tended 



 

211 

to be more in awe of European culture (often without sacrificing a concurrent sense of 

patriotism), later travelers had more culture to be proud of at home and felt less indebted 

to European history and monuments. Fuller’s and Stowe’s relative images abroad 

illustrate this gradual change.  

One factor that both accompanied and influenced traveling Americans’ decreased 

involvement in European culture was the United States’ changing cultural status. In her 

first letter, Fuller notes modest increases in the prominence of American writing in 

Europe including passages from the Bostonian Dial included in an address by the 

Director of the Liverpool Institute and extracts of American writers in Bradshaw’s 

Railway Guide (42-43). Fuller’s own moderate fame as an American author allows her to 

meet with literary and cultural figures to which the average traveler would not have had 

access, including William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle (53, 100). In private 

correspondence, Fuller reports “that an English edition of her Papers on Literature and 

Art had ‘been courteously greeted in the London journals’ and that Woman in the 

Nineteenth Century ‘has been read and prized by many,’ including Mazzini” (Murray 

300). It is clear, however, that Fuller was primarily known only in select intellectual 

circles and was not familiar to the general populace of Europe.  

Stowe, on the other hand, was undeniably a celebrity in Europe as in the United 

States. Her biographer describes how Stowe’s “receptions swelled in size and enthusiasm 

as Stowe made her triumphant tour of Great Britain, where the sales of Uncle Tom’s 

Cabin were more than triple the already phenomenal figures of the United States, 



 

212 

reaching a million and a half in the first year” (Hedrick 233).
18

 Stowe’s prominence is 

made clear in one of the speeches given in her honor, a speech she includes in Sunny 

Memories. The Rev. C.M. Birrell describes how Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “going forth over 

the whole earth” and remarks on editions circulated in Belgium, published by the “priests 

of the church of Rome,” and, in St. Petersburg, even “translated into the Russian tongue” 

(I: xxi).
19

 Stowe travels in part to see the famous sights of Europe, but she also finds 

hundreds of Europeans flocking to see her (S. Wright). Throughout her travels, Stowe 

discovers that a Scottish family (I: 138), a musician at a French salon (II: 176-77), and 

Italian schoolchildren (II: 278), among others, are all familiar with her work. In a 

secluded village in the Alps, the villagers entreat the bestselling author, “O, madam, do 

write another! Remember, our winter nights here are very long!” (II: 198). Stowe may not 

have raised the value of American literature in European eyes singlehandedly, but 

another passage from a speech given in Stowe’s honor suggests the great difference 

Uncle Tom had made: 

Let us hear no more of the poverty of American brains, or the barrenness 

of American literature. Had it produced only Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it had 

evaded contempt just as certainly as Don Quixote, had there been no other 

product of the Spanish mind, would have rendered it forever illustrious. (I: 

xxxviii) 

                                                 
18

 With an interesting correspondence to the commercialization of tourism, Whitney 

Womack Smith describes how, during Stowe’s visit to England, the popularity of Uncle 

Tom’s Cabin “spawned an early example of a merchandising tie-in; abolitionist groups 

and English shopkeepers sold mass-produced ‘Uncle Tom’ goods, including almanacs, 

cups, picture books, card games, stationery, handkerchiefs, and dolls with likenesses of 

characters like Uncle Tom and Little Eva” (90). 

19
 Indeed, Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer, and Emily B. Todd note that “by 1853 the novel had 

been translated into French, Italian, Welsh, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Norwegian, 

and Slovenian, among other languages” (xviii). 



 

213 

This increased fame and recognition of American literature in Europe contributed to a 

growing sense of America’s own cultural value and, consequently for many travelers, a 

decline in their appreciation of the European culture previously viewed as superior.
20

 

Unlike the trips of many of their female contemporaries, Fuller’s and Stowe’s 

experiences abroad are remarkable for their engagement in politics, Fuller in the 1848 

Italian revolution and Stowe in the antislavery movement. In this sense, the travel 

writings of both show greater depth than Taylor’s focus on local color and idle 

amusements. Apart from this similarity, however, Fuller’s Tribune dispatches and 

Stowe’s Sunny Memories represent a shift in the nature of travel from cultural 

participation to tourism. Fuller’s dispatches describe the changing technology of travel 

that contributes to the rise of tourism. For example, she recommends taking passage, as 

she did, on a steamer rather than on an older sailing ship. The increased accessibility, 

speed, and convenience of steamers would set the tone for the new, shorter tour made 

more accessible to middle-class travelers (Sides 12). Yet, while Fuller praises the 

steamer, she calls the railroad “that convenient but most unprofitable and stupid way of 

traveling” (50). Speed and convenience make tourism pleasant and efficient, but, as with 

Taylor’s vetturino, they prevent a more active engagement with the land and its people. 

                                                 
20

 Kohn, Meer, and Todd observe a similar change in the relative respect given to 

American culture abroad: “Oddly juxtaposing accounts of Stowe’s literary pilgrimages 

(typical of an Old World tour) and her reception in Britain (crowds gathering to greet her 

train), Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands illustrates the beginnings of a cultural shift in 

British and American relations” (xxv). Taking this argument a step further, Schriber calls 

Sunny Memories “Stowe’s declaration of independence from the Old World” and argues 

that Stowe “thinks it imperative that Americans free themselves culturally and stand on 

their own two feet” (181). 



 

214 

At the same time, Fuller is careful to distinguish her travel from what was already 

a growing trend of superficial tourism. This critique is made apparent when she writes: 

The traveler passing along the beaten track, vetturinoed from inn to inn, 

ciceroned from gallery to gallery, thrown, through indolence, want of tact, 

or ignorance of the language, too much into the society of his compatriots, 

sees the least possible of the country. (131-32) 

The conveniences of tourism’s various guides, its standard itinerary of sights, and the 

ignorance of local languages such infrastructure allows all contribute to the superficiality 

of this new trend of European travel. Although Fuller’s initial travels in England and 

France follow a touristic model (Roberson 153), and she admits, “Like others, I went 

through the painful process of sight-seeing, so unnatural everywhere, so counter to the 

healthful methods and true life of the mind,” she is glad to report, “I now really live in 

Rome, and I begin to see and feel the real Rome” (Fuller 167-68). Beyond the usual 

practice of criticizing mere tourists, a ubiquitous trope which, as James Buzard argues, is 

as much a part of the “beaten track” of travel writing as any ciceroned gallery (153, 196-

97), Fuller’s thoughts on tourism, as well as her legitimate participation in Italian politics 

and society, demonstrate a clear allegiance to the earlier mode of European travel.
21

 

In Great Britain, Stowe’s fame and political activism may have separated her 

from the usual tourist, but her British sightseeing, her later tour of the Continent, and her 

                                                 
21

 A number of critics have also examined Fuller’s relationship to tourism and anti-

tourism. Leonardo Buonomo emphasizes how Fuller “repeatedly expressed aspiration to 

be a part of the scene, a scene made of people to meet, places to explore, and historical 

incidents of great import” (31). John Paul Russo also asserts that “Fuller did not fall 

victim to the ‘tourist gaze,’” but instead “stresses the need to see things slowly” (139-40). 

Taking a somewhat more complex view, Heidi Kolk describes Fuller’s “‘dialogic’ 

negotiation with travel narrative” and her recognition of “a certain dissonance—between 

her real experiences and her provisional power as travel correspondent, between her 

status as leisure traveler and her vicarious participation in the revolution, between her 

identities as intellectual and as woman” (381, 403). 



 

215 

account of those travels in Sunny Memories all participate in and support exactly the kind 

of travel “along the beaten track” that Fuller critiques. Particularly in the Continental 

sections of the trip, Stowe’s travel is essentially touristic (Roberson 141-43; Hedrick 250; 

S. Wright). Like her fellow tourists, Stowe does not seek new and potentially 

enlightening experiences, but visits sights which are “already imaginatively familiar” in 

order to “confirm what [she] already believe[s]” (Roberson 143).
22

 The lack of depth in 

Stowe’s impressions comes across in one of her concluding discussions of national 

character. She writes:  

I liked the English and the Scotch as well as I could like any thing. And 

now, I equally like the French. . . . So I regard nations as parts of a great 

common body, and national differences as necessary to a common 

humanity.  

I thought, when in English society, that it was as perfect and delightful 

as it could be. There was worth of character, strength of principle, true 

sincerity, and friendship, charmingly expressed. I have found all these, 

too, among the French, and besides them, something which charms me the 

more, because it is peculiar to the French, and of a kind wholly different 

                                                 
22

 In contrast, some critics have emphasized the significance of Stowe’s travel and travel 

writing beyond the merely touristic. Donald Ross, for example, argues that Stowe aimed 

“to capitalize on the publicity that her trip had created in order to bring together the 

American and British antislavery movements and mend fences among their factions” 

(132). While this may be a nobler goal than pure tourism, it still shows a lack of real 

concern for experiencing the culture of Europe. Instead, Stowe focuses on showcasing 

herself and using her position to help an American cause. She is touring as much to be 

seen as to see the sights of Britain. In an even more extreme attempt to recover the value 

of Stowe’s travel writing, Foster argues that Stowe presented herself in a self-consciously 

ironic way that “prefigures the multivocalism of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad and A 

Tramp Abroad, especially in its use of self-reflexive irony, with both writers exploiting 

the relationship between a public, representative persona and a more private, 

individualistic observer” (“Construction” 153-56). While Stowe may have had the ironic 

view of her position as tourist that Foster describes, it is too subtly (if at all) conveyed in 

Sunny Memories, so that even most modern readers have taken her position at face value. 

My purpose is neither to defend Stowe’s self-awareness nor to condemn her 

superficiality. For the purposes of the chronology of travel I am describing, the surface 

position most clearly avowed by Stowe has greater influence on her readers than 

whatever private views she might have held. 



 

216 

from any I have ever had an experience of before. There is an iris-like 

variety and versatility of nature . . . which is very captivating. (II: 406-

407) 

True to the sunniness her title promises, Stowe finds such national differences “perfect 

and delightful as . . . could be.” Beyond her enjoyment of regional idiosyncrasies, 

however, there is little substance to her observations. She is as pleased with varieties of 

character as any tourist is pleased with sights. For such a tourist, galleries and old 

buildings may be “delightful” in their minor differences, but little is gained from such 

observation. 

Not surprisingly, Fuller’s and Stowe’s differing emphases on the actual culture 

and daily life of Europe—in contrast to its guidebook sights—corresponds to their 

understanding of local languages. As previously noted, Fuller left the United States with 

an already extensive linguistic education, and her immersion in European society gave 

her ample opportunity to become fluent in both French and Italian.
23

 Indeed, when Fuller 

first met her future lover Ossoli, he spoke no English, so their growing relationship 

depended upon her own Italian (see Barolini 27; Murray 315). Fuller criticizes the kind of 

American tourist Stowe will become when she writes, “the American, on many points, 

becomes more ignorant for coming abroad, because he attaches some value to his crude 

impressions and frequent blunders,” adding, “It is necessary to speak the language of 

these countries and know personally some of their inhabitants in order to form any 

accurate impressions” (258). For Fuller, speaking the local language is an essential part 

of worthwhile travel. 

                                                 
23

 According to Durning, Fuller had some difficulty keeping up with French conversation 

in Paris, but during her residence in Italy, she became fluent in French as well as Italian 

(68). 



 

217 

In contrast, Stowe had only a limited understanding of foreign languages 

throughout her 1853 trip to Europe. While Fuller’s prior education and dedication to 

improving her fluency allowed her to enjoy a true residence in Italy, Stowe, despite her 

fame, could never move deeper into European society than the company of those who 

knew English. In Sunny Memories, as Stowe tours the sights, this language barrier 

hampers her appreciation for what she is seeing. When the party goes to see the Luther 

relics, for example, they first have difficulty communicating what they want, and then, 

when a guide does arrive, she is “a little woman who spoke no English, whom, guide 

book in hand, we followed” (II: 362). Similarly led by a non-English-speaking guide in 

the vaults of the Pantheon, Stowe reports, “we were marched to a place where our guide 

made a long speech about a stone in the floor—very instructive, doubtless, if I had known 

what it was” (II: 398). Stowe’s appreciation for what she tours is inevitably diminished 

when she cannot understand what she is seeing. Eventually, as the numbers of such 

monolingual travelers increased, hotels and other businesses of the tourist industry began 

to compensate for their linguistic limitations. Stowe already reports, “In every hotel of 

each large city, there is a man who speaks English. The English language is slowly and 

surely creeping through Europe; already it rivals the universality of the French” (II: 320-

21). The problem with such accommodation, however, is that it encourages and supports 

the growing number of tourists who never learn more than a smattering of the local 

language. Taylor, like Stowe, arrived in Europe with little foreign language education, 

but he was forced to learn to communicate abroad. As the century progressed, and the 

numbers of English-speaking tourists increased, learning the local language became less 

and less of a necessity. 



 

218 

Another aspect of Fuller’s and Stowe’s disparate relations to linguistic difference 

is the role of translation in their travel writing and in their careers. Of all of the writers 

examined in this study, Fuller has been given by far the most attention as a professional 

translator. Durning is critical of Fuller’s early translation of Goethe’s Tasso, but finds a 

“progressive improvement” in her subsequent translations (Durning 103-105, 120). His 

analysis of this development, particularly of Fuller’s realization that translation is more 

challenging than she might have first thought, suggests that Fuller developed an 

increasingly nuanced understanding of the nature of translation throughout her career.
24

 

Taking a more theoretical approach, Christina Zwarg uses Fuller’s translations to 

examine “the way in which ‘feminist’ issues are often enmeshed and perhaps even 

articulated through the task of the translator” (463). Colleen Glenney Boggs devotes an 

entire chapter to Fuller’s translations, arguing that Fuller “developed a strategy of 

fragmentation and suture that brings into being an American literature that is 

domestically and globally transnational—or, we might say, translational” (92). As 

evocative as arguments of the type made by Boggs and Zwarg can be, they seem 

somewhat too easily to find in Fuller’s work all that is recognized as positive by modern 

transnational, postcolonial, feminist (and so on) theory, rather than examining Fuller’s 

translations in a more historical context. Nevertheless, Fuller’s role as a translator is 

central to understanding her relationship to Europe. 

                                                 
24

 Karen A. English similarly describes how Fuller is “initially mistaken about the ease of 

translating . . . noncanonical works of conversation and correspondence,” but how, over 

time, she develops a more sophisticated theory of translation in her recognition “that 

different kinds of writing require different kinds of translation strategies” (133). After 

Fuller discovers that it requires six months’ residence in Italy to become fluent in Italian, 

her understanding of the difficulties of bilingualism and translation develops even further 

(English 142). 



 

219 

Karen A. English is alone in devoting much attention to the translations 

embedded within Fuller’s Tribune dispatches. She calls Fuller “an interpreter of Italian 

politics and culture for American newspaper readers” and counts “twenty-seven 

translated texts” in Fuller’s dispatches (143). In contrast to Cooper’s practice of leaving 

foreign language untranslated, Fuller’s inclusion of these translations could be read as 

another aspect of the touristic apparatus encouraging monolingualism. However, in 

contrast to Taylor, Fuller does not aim to obviate further study of Italian language and 

culture. Joseph C. Schöpp confirms this difference when he argues that “Fuller regarded 

translation as more than just ‘an act of simple importation,’” and that her translations 

“were meant to initiate a dialogue between cultures” (32). Further, Durning describes 

how Fuller desired her readers to learn foreign language, and how “she was eager to 

acquaint her readers with the proper tools and methods for acquiring their own 

knowledge of the German language so that they would not have to depend upon 

translations of its masterpieces” (129). While Taylor clearly intended his Faust to be a 

substitute for the original, Fuller translates documents of the Italian revolution in order to 

draw her readers into further engagement with Italian politics and culture. 

Indeed, wanting more than merely to “initiate a dialogue,” Fuller translated 

documents of the 1848 revolution as part of a call to action. In the winter of 1847-48, she 

writes, “I earnestly hope some expression of sympathy from my country toward Italy. 

Take a good chance and do something” (160). The following summer, in one of her last 

dispatches, Fuller emphases her call to action even further by writing, “I see you have 

meetings, where you speak of the Italians, the Hungarians. I pray you do something; let it 

not end in a mere cry of sentiment” (311). As English argues, “By making her readers 



 

220 

privy (through translation and publication) to the complex flow of historical documents 

and events marking the political upheavals of the Italian revolution, Fuller draws them 

into the circle of her personal experience and provides them with perspectives that 

transcend national boundaries and language barriers” (145). While Taylor’s translations 

gave readers linguistically picturesque tidbits of European verse for superficial enjoyment 

and local color, Fuller presents her translations of political documents with a sense of 

urgency. For example, Fuller introduces her translation of letters “from the Milanese 

Government . . . to the Germans at large and the countries under the dominion of Austria” 

by noting that she translates them, “thinking they may not in other form reach America” 

(217). Fuller sees such documents as politically essential yet ephemeral, and takes 

advantage of her residence in Italy at such an important historical moment to bring 

information to her American readers that they otherwise might not receive. 

In striking contrast to Fuller, Stowe is unable to understand or translate much of 

the language of Europe, but she herself has been widely translated. For Stowe, all 

communication with Europe occurs at a remove. Because of the period’s protocols of 

female propriety, Stowe does not deliver her own speeches in Britain, and many of the 

Europeans she meets have read her novel in translation. While touring the Continent, 

Stowe also relies on her brother to translate much of what she cannot understand. When 

telling her brother to be careful of avalanches she says, only half in jest, “I could not 

spare you; first, because I have not learned French enough yet; and next, because I don’t 

know how to make change” (II: 235).
25

 Indeed, the men in Stowe’s life act as mediators 

                                                 
25

 Stowe’s correlation of linguistic and economic exchange in this comic warning have 

echoes in Twain’s similar complaints about foreign language and money in Innocents 

Abroad. 



 

221 

throughout the entire tour—not only do they deliver speeches, translate conversations, 

and broker commercial transactions, but Stowe even allows her brother to speak for her 

in her own travelogue by including large sections of his journal with minimal alterations 

(Foster, “Construction” 153-54). An anecdote described by Boggs epitomizes Stowe’s 

touristic view of European language. As Boggs reports, “on her first trip to Europe, 

[Stowe] hired a native speaker to instruct her by reading ‘several pages from Uncle Tom 

in French’” (131). Thus, even when she does attempt to learn some of the local language, 

Stowe misses the opportunity to receive European cultural content at the same time and 

instead, with a hint of megalomania, listens to a translation of her own novel.  

Like Fuller, Stowe also receives her own chapter in Boggs’s study of translation 

in nineteenth-century American literature, but not for undertaking any of her own 

translations. Instead, translation lies at the center of a lawsuit Stowe fought shortly before 

leaving for her tour. In 1852, Stowe sued F. W. Thomas for infringing on her copyright of 

Uncle Tom’s Cabin with an unauthorized German translation published in America, 

Stowe herself having commissioned her own German translation (Boggs 127-29). In 

claiming that a translation should be subject to the same copyright laws as a reprinting, 

Stowe’s suit treats a translation as an exact copy of the original. As Boggs has examined 

in depth, the suit consequently raises the important issue of whether the act of translation 

requires sufficient creativity and invention to make it the translator’s own intellectual 

property. 

 As interesting as these debates may be, Stowe’s varied remarks about translation 

throughout Sunny Memories make it unlikely that she has contemplated it in these terms. 

For example, as Boggs also notes, the argument for Stowe’s side of the litigation appears 



 

222 

to contradict her praise of Madame Belloc’s French translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 

which was published in France. Stowe writes in Sunny Memories: 

[Madame Belloc’s] translation of Uncle Tom has to me all the merit and 

all the interest of an original composition. In perusing it I enjoy the 

pleasure of reading the story with scarce any consciousness of its ever 

having been mine. (II: 395) 

Comparing this statement with the rationale of the lawsuit, Boggs argues that “Stowe 

distinguishes between translation as an international and an intranational practice” 

(131).
26

 Although Boggs’s subsequent analysis of the lawsuit provides a fascinating 

account of different contemporary views of translation, copyright, and authorship, her 

conclusion is not entirely convincing because it ignores the more obvious financial 

motive for Stowe’s apparent double standard—the desire to secure as much royalty 

money as possible. Moreover, Sunny Memories contains yet another seemingly 

contradictory statement about translation: 

Hamlet in French—just think of it. One never feels the national difference 

so much as in thinking of Shakespeare in French! Madame de Stael says 

of translation, that music written for one instrument cannot be played upon 

another. (II: 279)  

While Stowe implies that the unauthorized German translation of Uncle Tom is an exact 

copy, and calls the French translation an original composition, she suggests here that a 

translation of Shakespeare should not even be attempted. To me, the most likely 

explanation for such inconsistency is that Stowe has not theorized the practice of 

translation much at all, and so her ideas about what it entails are subordinate in any given 

statement to other social, cultural, or economic factors. In the case of Stowe’s lawsuit, 

                                                 
26

 Boggs further explains, “In international contexts, [Stowe] thinks of translation as a 

new composition, yet wishes for translation within the American context to be an exact 

copy of the original” (131). 



 

223 

treating a translation as its own work hurts her financially, so she wants it covered under 

her own copyright. When complimenting Belloc’s French translation, Stowe is being 

gracious to a woman who has hosted her in Paris while praising a work that can only 

increase her fame in a country where there is no possibility of holding a copyright. 

Because Stowe accedes to Shakespeare’s conventional status as an icon of English 

literature, her passing remarks on Hamlet in French fall into the “translator, traitor” 

school. It is clear that Stowe has not thought enough about the nature of translation to 

form any firm opinions about it. By extension, it is likely that she willingly accepts her 

mediated involvement in European society because she has not fully considered what 

might be lost in such a translation. 

For all that Fuller and Stowe have in common—their interest in politics, their 

gender, their prominence as writers, and the closeness of their trips chronologically—a 

comparison of the roles that foreign language and translation play in their European 

travel writing illustrates how the general shift in American travel was also occurring in 

the travel of famed American authors. Like her cosmopolitan literary predecessors, Fuller 

spoke many foreign languages, and although she translated extensively to bring foreign 

literature and philosophy to American readers, she also demonstrated a clear desire for 

those readers to learn the original languages. Stowe’s own writing was already 

extensively translated and reprinted, so she enjoyed greater fame upon her arrival in 

Europe than any of her American predecessors. But Stowe did not speak the languages of 

Europe, and so she relied upon interpreters while on the Continent. As technology made 

travel to Europe more accessible to Americans outside of the elite intellectual and 

wealthy classes, going abroad became less about participating in the cultural life of 



 

224 

Europe, with the knowledge of foreign languages such participation entailed. Despite her 

fame and access to European society, Stowe, like many other American travelers at mid-

century, focused on seeing the sights along a beaten track—insulated from the necessity 

of communicating across language barriers and hence removed from any real cultural 

involvement. Thus, while writers such as Cooper and Irving, or Ben Franklin and Thomas 

Paine before them, were once the most cosmopolitan of American travelers, Stowe 

demonstrates how the decreased cultural depth of tourism—initiated by middle-class 

Americans with less access to wealth, education, and status—began to affect how even 

the more famed American authors approached their time abroad. As this new mode of 

touring grew in prominence, even Melville was not immune to its influence. 

Melville on Tour  

Before beginning his literary career, Melville traveled the world as a sailor, and 

the works inspired by those years depict travel as an occupation rather than a pastime. In 

1856, however, Melville visited Europe and the Levant for a more touristic purpose. 

Although this study has previously drawn a clear distinction between travel to Europe 

and to parts of the non-Western world, Melville’s tour of the Holy Land is a fitting 

conclusion to this chapter for two reasons. First, because Melville had always afforded 

“savage” languages a degree of cosmopolitan respect— incorporating Polynesian words 

in his texts in the same way that Cooper included French—a change in his treatment of 

any language marks a personal shift in the treatment of linguistic difference, a departure 

from the same kind of cosmopolitan appreciation with which Cooper and his 

contemporaries viewed European languages. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the 

inclusion of the Levant in a sightseeing tour bespeaks the general expansion of touristic 



 

225 

travel beyond Europe, foreshadowing the conflation of all linguistic difference by 

century’s end. In this way, Clarel is an obvious precursor to Twain’s Innocents Abroad. 

The once essential distinction between Western and non-Western language will become 

far less important in the following discussions. 

In his introduction to Melville’s journal of the trip, Howard C. Horsford contends 

that the author’s visit to the Levant is much like those of “hundreds of accounts written 

by travelers,” and that Melville’s subsequent movements in Europe “followed tracks 

beaten wide and deep by English and American tourists” (10).
27

 Melville’s journal entry 

about his visit to Frankfurt is indicative of his largely touristic itinerary: “After dinner 

Smythe invited us to ride about town.—Goethe’s statue. Faust’s. Cathedral. Luther’s 

preaching place. River side. Park. Jews quarter. Rothschilds home. &c &c &c” (252-53). 

It is important to note that these jottings differ from the other works examined here in that 

they are not finished and published prose. They are what Franklin Walker calls “the sort 

of account kept by a writer who intends to draw on it later for literary work,” including 

primarily “day-by-day items of observation or sentences of reflection on these 

observations” (111). Still, Melville’s abbreviated descriptions indicate a mode of travel 

primarily concerned with seeing the notable sights, checking off boxes in the tourist’s 

typical itinerary. While Laurie Robertson-Lorant praises Melville’s journal as having 

nearly “the depth and intensity of his best prose fiction” (13), in conjunction with Clarel, 

                                                 
27

 Other critics seek to distinguish Melville’s travel from the usual mode of tourism. For 

example, Vincent Kenny insists that Melville’s “religious pilgrimage” distinguishes itself 

from the superficiality of most travelers of the period (Herman 45). However, Kenny also 

notes that “Melville became more the tourist after [his] disheartening experience” in the 

Holy Land (“Clarel” 377). 



 

226 

it exemplifies a final shift in Melville’s writing from an engagement with multilingualism 

to the circumvention of linguistic difference. 

In spite of Redburn’s realization that he can see more of the world at the 

Liverpool docks than by visiting the sights of England, Melville’s own trip is full of both 

guides and guidebooks. Horsford notes that, “like most English and American tourists, 

[Melville] almost unquestionably carried a good supply of the various Handbooks for 

Travellers issued by John Murray of London” (10). Melville also frequently reports his 

use of a personal guide, including while in Constantinople (78), Smyrna (106), Jerusalem 

(124-25), Rome (212), and Venice (228). Martyn Smith, too, notes the discrepancy 

between Melville’s own experience with guidebooks and that of his character Redburn, 

arguing that, “[t]raveling without the advantage of unlimited funds, [Melville] clearly 

understood the utility of these inexpensive guidebooks” (34). In Constantinople, Melville 

emphasizes this economic aspect of touristic travel when he notes, “Breakfast at 10 A.M. 

Took guide ($1.25 per day) and started a tour” (79). As part of the middle class to which 

travel was becoming increasingly accessible, Melville cannot engage in the kind of 

extended stay in society enjoyed by Cooper. Instead, he must use the convenience of 

guided travel to maximize what he can see and do on a limited budget. 

In addition to his typically touristic reliance on guides, the quality of Melville’s 

travel is also affected by the new technologies Fuller observed. For example, at the 

beginning of January 1857, Melville complains, “It racks me, that I can only spend one 

day in Cairo, owing to the steamer,” and he notes shortly after, “Steamer for Jaffa will 

not sail till tomorrow, so that I am wearied to death with two days in Alexandria which 

might have been delightfully spent in Cairo” (114). Although Melville would like to 



 

227 

follow his own itinerary according to his intellectual pursuits, he is forced to conform to 

the apparatuses of tourism. Melville similarly describes how the railroad, another 

technology of more convenient tourism, has the potential for further drawing the traveler 

out of any real engagement with his destination. Melville notes in his descriptions of the 

Cairo railroad, “From the car (1
st
 class) you seem in England. All else Egypt” (122). 

Those who can afford to travel with the most luxury and convenience also remove 

themselves from any genuine experience of the foreign. Melville thus is both an observer 

and a participant in the increasingly touristic nature of American travel. 

True to his presentation of foreign language in earlier works, however, Melville 

still demonstrates an interest in the experience of multilingualism, even if new 

technology and the availability of English-speaking guides lessen the impact of foreign 

language on the traveler. At first, Melville seems overwhelmed by the multiplicity of 

languages he hears at a steamer landing in Greece. As Kim Fortuny insightfully observes, 

“Diversity and dilapidation come hand in hand in the paragraphs, and Melville’s 

attraction to the first never seems tempered by his discomfort with the latter” (4). 

Melville describes: “Great uproar of the porters & contention for luggage. Imagine an 

immense accumulation of the rags of all nations, & all colors rained down on a dense 

mob all struggling for huge bales & bundles of rags, gesturing with all gestures & 

wrangling in all tongues” (73). With each person struggling with the logistics of travel, 

the multiplicity of languages and nationalities leads to chaos, and it is impossible to 

derive anything but further confusion from the hubbub.  

Melville describes a similar experience in Constantinople: 

Great crowds of all nations—money changers—coins of all nations 

circulate—Placards in four or five languages; [(Turkish, French, Greek, 



 

228 

Armenian) Lottery.] advertisements of boats the same. You feel you are 

among the nations. Great curse that of Babel; not being able to talk to a 

fellow being, &c.—Have to beware of your pockets. (84-85, brackets in 

original) 

Once again, Melville couples linguistic difference with monetary exchange as the 

currency of one economic system is translated into another. In this multinational 

environment, there is no single accepted currency, but all parties must struggle to make 

different systems commensurable as “coins of all nations circulate.” Likewise, vendors 

use multiple languages to advertise what may be bought. Melville seems to relish the 

internationalism of the scene, but, while his respect of native language in Typee followed 

Cooper in its valuation of linguistic difference, Melville wishes here, as he imagines in 

Redburn, that the “curse of Babel be revoked.” Still, he does not, like Twain’s 

exaggerated American persona, shun the foreign altogether. Melville still recognizes the 

value of communication and exchange with other cultures, longing for a universal 

language that would make such communication less problematic. Nevertheless, it is 

important to recognize, as discussed in the Introduction, that this extreme form of 

cosmopolitanism has a tendency to slide into imperialistic coercion, forcing seemingly 

“inferior” cultures to lose their own sense of identity as they join a universal(ly Western) 

brotherhood. Moreover, Melville’s yearning for the global fellowship a universal 

language would provide is undercut by his apparent fear of theft. Just as the various 

lottery signs invite all nationalities to gamble their money away, the scene of 

international exchange becomes one of foreign threat as the confusion of multilingualism 

makes travelers easy marks for pickpockets.
28

 

                                                 
28

 In this sense, the scene in Greece bears a marked resemblance to The Confidence-Man, 

the manuscript of which Melville had carried to London on the first leg of his journey, 



 

229 

 

The journal contains a number of such passages emphasizing the multilingualism 

of travel and the potential chaos of international exchange. Years later, however, when 

Melville used the impressions of his 1856-57 trip as inspiration for the epic poem Clarel 

(1876), much of this multilingualism was effaced. As Brian Yothers describes, Melville 

shaped the raw material of his journal into “a massive narrative poem” that “struggles to 

achieve a truthful reconstruction of the Holy Land precisely by using the latitude 

provided by fiction and poetry” (Romance 111). The majority of Clarel comprises the 

characters’ inner monologs and philosophical discussions, and those who have examined 

it in depth accordingly focus on the nature and possibility of religious belief instead of 

reading Clarel as a kind of travelogue. Vincent Kenny argues that Clarel’s “journey 

through the Holy Land is to be his initiation into the awful mystery of tragic existence” 

(Herman 71), and William Potter calls the work “nothing less than a hugely conceived 

study of the very nature of all belief” (xiii).
29

 In contrast to more pedestrian works of 

travel literature (no pun intended), Clarel has a complex relationship to its place. On the 

one hand, as numerous critics have pointed out, the profound significance of the Holy 

Land inevitably shapes the philosophical content of the work, and Melville’s own 

                                                                                                                                                 

and which was published in both New York and London while he was in Italy (Horsford 

4-13). 

29
 Focusing on the centrality of philosophical discussion, Buell calls Clarel “a semi-

omnisciently orchestrated dialogue among contending participant-observers” (“Poet” 

146). Robert Milder also sees the work as “Melville’s attempt to sift the range of 

intellectual and emotional responses to the later nineteenth-century crisis of belief” (195). 

Stan Goldman represents an even more specifically religious reading in his discussion of 

what he calls Melville’s “‘protest theism’: a paradoxical combination and coalescence of 

both protest and love based on the need that the unsatisfied heart has for God” (4). 



 

230 

pilgrimage occurred at a moment of personal turmoil that influenced his impressions of 

the place (see Jonik 73; Kenny, Herman 221; Yothers, Romance 110). On the other hand, 

what Harvey calls the “[e]xceptionally cosmopolitan . . . pilgrim group” fosters a variety 

of intellectual issues that transcend the locality of their pilgrimage (134).
30

 Clarel cannot 

be ignored in a study of Melville’s engagement with travel, although the issues I will 

examine here admittedly comprise only a small fraction of the poem’s depth. 

To some extent, Clarel does continue Melville’s previous treatment of the nature 

of travel. At first, as in Redburn, Melville sets up a contrast between the youthful dreams 

inspired by books and the reality of actual travel. In the opening canto, Clarel muses, 

“Needs be my soul, / Purged by the desert’s subtle air / From bookish vapors” (I.1.66-

68). Further comparing the reality of seeing the Levant to what he has read, Clarel 

reflects: “The books, the books not all have told” (I.1.84). This contrast between traveling 

and reading about foreign lands is accompanied by what Shirley M. Dettlaff calls the 

“Pilgrim/Tourist dichotomy” (201). According to Dettlaff, Melville contrasts “the 

Hebraic pilgrim, who realizes that the journey is a spiritual one like those taken by the 

great saints” with “the sightseeing trip taken by a Hellenic tourist,” and, as Dettlaff 

                                                 
30

 Several others have likewise emphasized Clarel’s cosmopolitanism. Dennis Berthold 

argues that “Clarel is not just about the author’s experiences, American politics, or 

Palestine; rather, it is a cosmopolitan epic whose manifold ideologies demand a 

transnational perspective” (232). Wyn Kelley argues that “Clarel provides a rich canvas 
of teeming human activity, within which people from every conceivable region, religious 

background, and racial and cultural identity converge at the world’s most cosmopolitan 

city, lending it the diversity of their many voices and opinions” (Herman 152). For Amy 

Kaplan, Melville depicts in Clarel a “polyglot world” that “represents an extraordinary 

interaction of peoples and cultures as they circulate through cities of the Levant” 

(“Transnational” 51). As the following reading will demonstrate, however, this potential 

multilingualism may be implied, but it is not depicted in the same way as the foreign 

languages in Melville’s earlier works. 



 

231 

argues, Clarel’s “journey into the desert begins as the pseudo-quest of a mere traveler, 

since he still does not understand the nature of the true pilgrimage” (201, 210). The 

contrasts between tourist and pilgrim and between books and reality come into focus in 

Clarel’s encounter with the tract dispenser Nehemiah. On the surface, “the elder” man 

seems to inspire Clarel to become a religious pilgrim instead of a touristic and superficial 

traveler: 

   A strain 

Of trouble seamed the elder brow: 

“A pilgrim art thou? pilgrim thou?” 

Words simple, which in Clarel bred 

More than the simple saint divined; 

And, thinking of vocation fled, 

Himself he asked: or do I rave, 

Or have I left now far behind 

The student of the sacred lore? 

Direct he then this answer gave: 

“I am a traveler—no more.” (I.9.18-28) 

In his reflections and his response, Clarel renounces the identity (shared with Redburn) of 

a youthful student of books traveling to see his dreams made real. The object of Clarel’s 

study will become the land itself rather than the “sacred lore” he has read about it.  

If Nehemiah is Clarel’s model of a pilgrim, however, he is an exemplar of 

religious and psychological depth but not of linguistic diversity. Nehemiah is one in a 

series of Americans that Clarel meets in the Holy Land, coming from “[h]is home by 

Narragansett’s marge” (I.8.5). Thus the meeting represents not an encounter with the 

foreign but a displaced form of the domestic, much like the expatriate communities 

traveling Americans found in increasing numbers toward the end of the century. Just as 

Nehemiah addresses Clarel in unproblematically understandable English, Melville 

associates his tracts with the curse of Babel’s reversal: “His tracts all fluttering like 



 

232 

tongues / The fire-flakes of the Pentecost” (I.8.42-43). When the apostles began speaking 

in tongues, their speech was both the polyglot babble described by Melville in his journal 

and a model of universal comprehensibility. Nehemiah represents this transcendence of 

linguistic difference. The journal’s description of a similar tract dispenser is even more 

cynical: “The old Connecticut man wandering about with tracts &c — knew not the 

language — hopelessness of it — his lonely batchelor rooms [sic]” (142-43). Here, the 

Pentecostal hope of the curse of Babel’s reversal is undercut by the Connecticut man’s 

linguistic ignorance (see Horsford’s footnote 142-43n8). Although the tract dispenser’s 

religious propaganda may aim to overcome the curse of Babel, his ignorance of the local 

language prevents him from achieving a more practical level of understanding. He is a 

hopelessly lonely figure, cut off from real intercourse with his fellow men. 

Clarel’s early encounter with the American Nehemiah is part of a larger trend 

throughout the work. In sharp contrast to the experiences of Tommo on Nukuhiva, Clarel 

meets more fellow pilgrims and travelers than locals, and, consequently, he has little need 

to understand languages other than English. Lawrence Buell emphasizes Clarel’s 

“medley of culturally disparate individuals,” but he admits that “America is 

disproportionately represented, most of the featured pilgrims being American expatriates 

or wanderers” (“Question” 230). In addition to Clarel and Nehemiah, two other central 

characters, Rolfe and Vine, are American. Derwent, Mortmain, and Glaucon are also 

visitors to the Holy Land, although they are from Europe. When the pilgrims are joined 

by three others after leaving Mar Saba, one of them, Ungar, is again an American. Tim 

Wood goes so far as to argue that the setting of Clarel “obscures an underlying American 

geography,” which he further describes as the “Puritan transplantation of a biblical 



 

233 

landscape” (86). Even critics who emphasize the diversity of Melville’s characters focus 

on extra-national characteristics such as religious belief (Potter 18), or, even more 

extremely, the work’s “catalogue of depersonalizations in which the landscape presses on 

characters and effaces boundaries of the individual and the human” (Jonik 72). The 

pilgrims may be cosmopolitan, but the effect of this diversity is not the broadening of 

Clarel’s cultural horizons but the discussion’s removal to a level beyond national 

difference. While Tommo found himself to be the rare foreigner among native 

Polynesians, Clarel remains in a substantial company of countrymen, and the vast 

majority of people he meets are travelers rather than locals. 

The various nationalities represented by Clarel’s party could have provided an 

opportunity for multilingualism, but all conversation occurs unproblematically in 

English. While Typee and Omoo are interspersed with Polynesian in an effort to represent 

the multilingualism of the South Pacific, Clarel, despite the Babelian confusion Melville 

describes in his journal, contains only a smattering of foreign words. The few examples 

of such occurrences, notable for their rarity, include “‘Resurget’—faintly Derwent there. / 

‘In pace’—Vine” (II.39.68-69); “ELOI LAMA SABACHTHANI” (III.7.1); and “Vented 

a resonant, ‘Bismillah!’ / Strange answer which pealed from on high— / ‘Dies iræ, dies 

illa!’” (III.19.171-73). Even these examples are all religious and ceremonial language, 

not the every-day foreign language that would indicate any real engagement with the 

present life of the Holy Land. When the “New-Comer” Don Hannibal Rohon Del 

Aquaviva appears late in the poem, his interspersed and easily understood Spanish— 

which includes “Hidalgos” (IV.19.12), “reformado” (IV.19.42), and “Good, excellenza—

excellent!” (IV.19.151)—is still a language of the New World (and Western Europe) and 



 

234 

not of the ancient Near East that Clarel is visiting. Just as often, the narration states that 

something is either read or heard in a foreign language, but little of the experience of 

linguistic diversity is conveyed to the reader. One such example is the description of the 

“Paynim” arms held in Mar Saba: 

    Upon one serpent-curving blade 

Love-motto beamed from Antar’s rhyme 

In Arabic. A second said 

(A scimiter the Turk had made, 

And likely, it had clove a skull) 

IN NAME OF GOD THE MERCIFUL! 

A third was given suspended place, 

And as in salutation waved, 

And in old Greek was finely graved 

With this: HAIL, MARY, FULL OF GRACE! (III.12.15-24) 

These inscriptions suggest the diverse linguistic history of the region, but their 

multilingualism is denoted rather than performed. All translations are given directly and 

unproblematically, as if all were written in one universal tongue. Thus, while Melville 

occasionally describes the Levant as polyglot, he does not portray that multilingualism 

directly. 

Indeed, while Typee demonstrates a genuine attempt to depict the complex 

linguistic situation on Nukuhiva, all of Clarel is essentially a translation—not only of the 

polyglot Levant into English, but of natural speech into verse. Most readings of Clarel 

spend some time examining the poem’s Hudibrastic, and often sing-song, prosody. Cody 

Marrs argues that “Melville’s crooked sentences, meters, and rhymes continually draw 

attention to the poem’s form” (111). Similarly noting the obtrusiveness of Melville’s 

extremely constricting verse form, Robert Milder calls the language of Clarel “cadences 



 

235 

removed at once from natural speech and mellifluent epical speech” (195).
31

 The 

constraints of Melville’s prosodic choices do not necessarily lead to an inferior product, 

of course. Samuel Otter, defending Melville against the more negative readings of his 

verse, argues that Clarel’s “meter and syntax often convey a divided spiritual, political, 

and sexual condition” (“How” 473). For my purposes, the important point is not what 

artistic or philosophical merits Melville’s metrical choices may have, but simply that 

Clarel’s language is doubly removed from the potential linguistic verisimilitude of the 

novel or the travelogue genres: not only is it verse rather than prose, but its particular 

prosody is less natural than most verse forms. In essence, Melville translates all language 

into this constricting doggerel. 

Occasionally, when the main narration introduces a character’s history, the fact of 

Clarel’s pervasive intralingual translation becomes even more apparent. One such 

example is the preface to Nehemiah’s account of Nathan: 

  No willing haste 

The mentor showed; awhile he fed 

On anxious thoughts; then grievingly 

The story gave—a tangled thread, 

Which, cleared from snarl and ordered so, 

Follows transferred, with interflow 

Of much Nehemiah scarce might add. (I.16.198-204) 

                                                 
31

 Bryan Short gives an excellent explanation of why tetrameter sounds more sing-song 

than pentameter. He takes Northrop Frye’s assertion that “English epic verse naturally 

tends to a four-beat line” and argues that “the longer line of the English epic tradition—

from alliterative to blank verse—permits four accentual stresses to appear in a line less 

frequently than every other syllable, thus providing a hedge against strict metrics” 

(“Form” 559-60). Conversely, Melville’s tetrameter, though not unique among other long 

poems, is more obtrusively metrical than the blank verse of Shakespeare or Milton, and 

its frequent rhyme takes the language even further away from natural speech. 



 

236 

Just as Nehemiah must transfer his own thoughts into his story, the “tangled thread” of 

his narrative is ostensibly converted into the regular verse of the poem. The story of 

“Arculf and Adamnan” is similarly introduced: “But let the page / The narrator’s 

rambling way forget, / And make to run in even flow / His interrupted tale” (I.34.75-78). 

Once again, while the original narrative of these stories is irregular and inflected, the 

reader gets only the smooth and unblemished verse translation. A final example is the 

introduction to Agath’s backstory:  

    But, more of clearness to confer— 

Less dimly to express the thing 

Rude outlined by this mariner, 

License is claimed in rendering; 

And tones he felt but scarce might give, 

The verse essays to interweave. (IV.3.229-34) 

The verse translation orders what was once chaotic, while simultaneously professing to 

reveal what was meant but not fully expressed. In all of these examples, the 

verisimilitude and polyglotism that characterize a novel (as well as a travel narrative) are 

subsumed into the regularity of Melville’s verse. Just as the pilgrims are traveling to 

behold religious history and not to experience local culture, the poem is not concerned 

with the everyday speech or the reality of present life in the Levant. Rather, the stories of 

the characters and the setting of the work are means to the end of presenting 

philosophical debates occurring on a level above language. Accordingly, while Melville 

as “pilgrim” may be less superficial than his touristic counterparts, he is equally 

uninterested in experiencing the real life of the places he visits. 

The character of the dragoman, the party’s guide, is one area where the pilgrims’ 

sheltering from linguistic difference can be directly connected to the changing nature of 

travel. According to Ada Lonni, the dragoman in nineteenth-century Jerusalem was the 



 

237 

ultimate cultural mediator, one who “interprets, translates, and transposes words and 

ideas from one language to another, from one culture to another” (42). Yet this role 

changed with the emergence of mass tourism in the Holy Land, particularly as organized 

by Thomas Cook:  

[E]verything would be easier: the travelers—whether tourists, pilgrims or 

scholars—were under protection, travelling without much risk, with a 

minimum of inconvenience. But also without any chance of fully 

experiencing the local atmosphere and its peculiarities. (Lonni 46)  

Lonni describes how, in the wake of these changes, the dragoman was converted into a 

mere tour guide as Cook’s standardization of the tourists’ experience obviated the 

responsibilities of his previous position as cultural mediator (46-47). The dragoman’s 

new role is suggested by Melville’s depiction of the Druze’s isolation from the other 

characters: “Exiled, cut off, in friendless state, / The Druze maintained an air sedate; / 

Without the sacrifice of pride, / Sagacious still he earned his bread” (II.7.21-24). He may 

play an essential role for Clarel and his fellow pilgrims, but he does so quietly and 

without calling attention to the necessity of his office. After all, the logistics of the tour 

are far from the central concern of the poem. Clarel’s experience may not have the 

extreme standardization of Twain’s, but the limited attention given to what would have 

been the Druze’s traditional role of translator forecasts the lack of cultural exchange that 

will result from the convenience of modern travel.  

Clarel thus serves as an interesting transitional example between the main body of 

Melville’s work and the representations of tourism found in, and largely espoused by, the 

travel writings of Mark Twain. It is easy to claim that Melville was more deeply 

concerned with philosophy and spirituality than Twain, but this greater philosophical 

depth does not continue the profound attention to linguistic and cultural diversity found 



 

238 

in Melville’s earlier travel writings. Indeed, despite its setting and premise, Clarel is not 

so much about visiting the Holy Land as it is about the Holy Land’s failure to provide the 

religious and ontological answers that Clarel and Melville both seek. Melville’s travel in 

the Holy Land may differ drastically from Twain’s in this philosophical profundity, but 

the monolingual expatriate community that Clarel finds there prefigures the travel and 

travel writing that will come to dominate in the last decades of the nineteenth century. 

 

The four authors examined in this chapter illustrate the many changes in 

American travel to Europe and the extension of European modes of touring beyond the 

continent. Although Bayard Taylor’s idea of travel derives from his predecessors, genteel 

and cosmopolitan figures like Cooper who spoke the languages of Europe and moved in 

society, Taylor was unable to achieve those ideals. The apparatuses of tourism were not 

so developed in the mid-1840s that Taylor could avoid learning new languages entirely, 

but Views A-Foot expands the transformation Taylor was already experiencing by 

encouraging future travelers to seek further linguistic isolation. Fuller’s inarguable 

cosmopolitanism demonstrates that such changes in travel were neither total nor 

immediate, but a comparison of her Tribune dispatches to Stowe’s Sunny Memories 

further illustrates the rise of tourism, demonstrating how the experiences of literary 

figures also became increasingly mediated, even as Europe’s valuation of American 

culture rose. Although Melville remained critical of the growing superficiality epitomized 

by both Taylor and Stowe in his fictional retelling of his earlier experiences as a 

merchant sailor, when he visited Europe and the Levant later in life, he too was 

influenced by the increasingly touristic nature of American travel. 



 

239 

Thus Melville, like Taylor and Stowe, and even Fuller to a lesser extent, 

demonstrates the gradual extension of superficial, touristic travel into the formerly 

cosmopolitan literary sphere. The lack of attention to local language and culture—which 

began, for travelers like Bayard Taylor, with an unavoidable lack of capital, education, 

and status—developed from an effect of the democratization of European travel into an 

ideological preference. As travelogues like Views A-Foot and Sunny Memories fixed the 

limited cultural experiences of their authors as a model to be followed, future travelers 

were not only less able to move in society as did Franklin or Cooper, but less interested in 

doing so. The reason for European travel had shifted, and rather than a mind-broadening 

means of exposure to different languages and cultures, it became an empty commodity, 

stripped of all engagement with meaningful cultural difference. Indeed, as the writings of 

Twain and James will demonstrate, European language and culture seemed no more 

valuable to many late-nineteenth-century Americans than the cannibal cultures of the 

South Seas.



 

240 

CHAPTER 5 

MARK TWAIN, MASS TOURISM, AND AMERICAN NATIONALISM 

After the Civil War, the increased convenience and superficiality of European 

travel developed into a full-blown age of tourism.
1
 In the 1840s and 50s, travelers like 

Bayard Taylor, Margaret Fuller, and Herman Melville had either observed with scorn or 

taken advantage of the new technologies of travel that streamlined Americans’ movement 

through Europe, shortening trips, lowering expenses, and decreasing the traveler’s 

engagement with anything resembling local culture or society. In the decades after the 

Civil War, these technologies defined American travel abroad even more than before. 

Trains and steamers allowed for faster travel from point to point, eliminating all 

substantial engagement with the real life occurring between. At the same time, a growing 

network of English-speaking guides and couriers obviated interaction with people outside 

of the tourist industry, making it unnecessary to learn the local language. In the last 

decades of the century, developments like the Kodak camera and American Express 

travelers checks streamlined travel and its documentation even further (F. Walker 25).
2
 

And for many American tourists, less difficulty meant less effort, and ultimately, less 

engagement with foreign culture and society. 

                                                 
1
 As Jeffrey Alan Melton describes it, “Americans were ‘on the move’ in unprecedented 

numbers . . . . For the first time in history, tourism was beginning to become the norm for 

a significantly broader segment of the population” (17). Foster Rhea Dulles also 

summarizes the rise of this new age of tourism: “In the latter half of the nineteenth 

century, a series of developments made travel more comfortable, and at least relatively 

less expensive. There were faster steamships, improved means of transportation on the 

continent, and new tourist services smoothing the way for bewildered Americans faced 

with unfamiliar customs and unintelligible languages” (102).  

2
 James Buzard also highlights the economic aspect of tourism, noting the importance of 

“refinements made in instruments of finance, enabling tourists to change currency and 

replenish their purses while on tour” (79). 



 

241 

In his study of the tourist phenomenon, Dean MacCannell emphasizes the 

inauthenticity of the tourist experience and argues that tourists, unlike travelers, are 

commonly “reproached for being satisfied with superficial experiences of other peoples 

and other places” (10). While the divide between tourists and anti-tourists is never 

straightforward—with most travelers at least attempting to differentiate themselves from 

the superficial masses—by the end of the nineteenth-century, American travel had 

attained a degree of superficiality, speed, and emphasis on consumer culture that had 

never before been reached.
 3

 As Cushing Strout has put it, rather than traveling for “truth 

or beauty,” Americans were going abroad for less elevated reasons including “pleasure, 

health, novelty, social prestige, or escape from the cares of dull routine” (111). The 

cachet of European travel remained a constant motivator, but while earlier travelers 

gained that cultural capital by experiencing European life and society, tourism’s goal 

became the distinction of having seen Europe, with an increased emphasis on sight rather 

than on understanding (Cronin, Across 118). 

However amorphous the designation of “tourist” might be, there is little doubt 

that the characteristics of the late-nineteenth-century American abroad are epitomized in 

the travel writing of Mark Twain. Twain captures the essence of the American tourist 

                                                 
3
 Buzard explains how the word “tourist” gradually changed from a straightforward 

synonym for traveler into a negative distinction, indicating one who “is the dupe of 

fashion, following blindly where authentic travellers have gone with open eyes and free 

spirits” (1). However, both tourists and anti-tourists shared the common “aim of making 

the tour pay in cultural capital accepted by home society” (197). Terry Caesar also 

cautions against being overly concerned with “locating . . . the precise moment when 

tourism can be distinguished from travel” (25). Although disparaging comments about 

American tourists “multiplied, often with added harshness, as American access to Europe 

became easier in the last third of the century” (Buzard 217), such disparagements were 

nothing new, and “[t]he ‘ugly American’ syndrome is virtually coterminous with the 

American travel text’s very origins” (Caesar 38). 



 

242 

through a combination of his fellow traveling companions and his own narrative 

persona.
4
 Although Twain often satirizes the typical traveling American, continuing the 

same tradition as Cooper’s critique of Steadfast Dodge in Homeward Bound (see Chapter 

One), his semi-fictional travelogues celebrate other aspects of the American “innocent” 

abroad. Both Cooper and Twain critique pretention without substance. But instead of 

Cooper’s nuanced appreciation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of both 

American and European culture, Twain champions a recourse to American simplicity. 

Similarly, Twain’s comic misuse of foreign language echoes Dodge’s linguistic foibles. 

But while Cooper demonstrates a nuanced understanding of linguistic difference, Twain 

presents translation as either doomed to failure or too easily made literal and transparent, 

the same attitude that characterizes the views of “savage” languages in imperialist 

discourse.  

Moreover, Twain had a lifelong obsession with money and speculation 

(Dolmetsch 213), and he blurred the line between literature and commodity by publishing 

his travelogues as subscription books (Cook 151-52). This capitalistic emphasis 

illustrates another aspect of the tourist age: the commodification of travel empties the 

foreign of any real meaning, replacing previously mind- and character-altering 

experiences with souvenirs and snapshots.
5
 Just as what Karl Marx identifies as “a 

                                                 
4
 As Melton points out, “For readers in the late nineteenth century, Mark Twain was first 

and foremost a travel writer instead of a novelist,” and both “The Innocents Abroad and A 

Tramp Abroad make ideal travel-book companions, both books capturing the vagaries of 

the Tourist Age” (1, 59). 

5
 G. Llewellyn Watson and Joseph P. Kopachevsky, in their study of the commoditization 

of tourism, examine how “cheap, . . . mass-produced” souvenirs “symbolize the tourists’ 

experience” (290). 



 

243 

fetishism of . . . commodities” severs the connection between “the commodity-form” and 

“the physical nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of 

this” (164), such mass-produced representations of experience empty any meaning from 

the experience itself. Although Twain is not entirely earnest in the presentation of these 

touristic values, his satire is sufficiently open-ended so that it invites the reader to agree 

with many of the views he might seem to critique. This chapter will argue that, without a 

clear condemnation of touristic superficiality, Twain turns cultural difference into an 

empty sign resembling Marx’s commodity fetish.  

In his three accounts of foreign travel, Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, and 

Following the Equator, Twain infuses the travelogue genre with the characteristics of 

mass tourism. Although his eventual status of literary celebrity and his extensive 

international travel gave Twain the opportunity to pursue the high-brow European 

experience enjoyed by Cooper—an experience eagerly, if only partially, emulated by 

later expatriate figures such as Henry James—Twain maintains the qualities of low-brow, 

popular literature in his accounts, appealing to the common American rather than to the 

literary elite. Furthermore, instead of learning European language, Twain suggests that 

the foreign is often not worth understanding. When he does attempt a translation, his 

mechanical and overly literal transference of meaning turns linguistic difference into 

absurd gibberish. As a result, Twain’s works embrace tourism in both content and form, 

denouncing the once-admired culture of Europe in favor of the tourist’s bric-a-brac of 

superficial impressions and asserting a nationalistic and exclusive preference for 

American culture and language. 



 

244 

Mark Twain’s Enshrined Innocence 

Twain’s first published travelogue, Innocents Abroad (1869), offers a perfect 

illustration of the changes in European travel after the Civil War. Its subject is the 

steamship Quaker City’s 1867 tour of Europe and the Holy Land, which thanks in no 

small part to its immortalization in Innocents Abroad, is widely considered to be both the 

beginning and the archetype of the tourist boom.
6
 Indeed, the Quaker City excursion was 

“the first luxury cruise” (Ganzel 6). Innocents Abroad was also an innovation in the genre 

of travel literature, a satirical hybrid that is less reverent than its more serious 

predecessors, but whose humorous descriptions are also too earnest to be written off as 

pure mockery.
7
  

Not only does Twain’s book mark the birth of the tourist age, but, as several 

studies of Twain’s publishing practices help demonstrate, it also contributes to the rise of 

mass culture more generally. In her examination of how Innocents Abroad was shaped by 

its publication as a subscription book, Nancy Cook describes Twain’s publisher’s 

emphasis on “what ‘sells’” and his instructions “not that Mark Twain write a book but 

that he ‘make’ one,” resulting in “a process of compilation and revamping, even 

commanding material, rather than one of composing” (153-54). This attitude, and the 

                                                 
6
 As Jeffrey Steinbrink argues, the voyage “not only signaled the beginning of middle-

class American tourism but also gave rise to a book in which even the present-day 

American tourist can recognize something of himself” (284). 

7
 Franklin R. Rogers, for example, describes how Twain went beyond the typical 

conventions of burlesque travel literature that he had employed in an earlier series of 

letters from Hawaii to the Alta California newspaper by shaping those “conventions to 

his own artistic purposes” (38). Others have noted how the book skillfully combines the 

genre of travel literature with journalism, autobiography, and even fiction (Canby 90; 
Cook 170; Ganzel 68; H. Smith 22). 



 

245 

market for subscription books that encouraged it, made the volume more like a 

commodity than a high-brow work of art. Twain’s decision to publish all his travelogues 

as subscription books demonstrates his abiding interest in popular literature and his 

emphasis on the conventional attitudes that sold best in the literary marketplace. Richard 

S. Lowry goes so far as to connect this low-brow aesthetic to tourism itself, calling 

Twain’s artistic values “an aesthetics of mass culture, an aesthetics potentially outside the 

realm of taste, dramatized by the blissfully ignorant tourist vandalizing the hierarchies of 

culture” (25). While Bayard Taylor’s travel writings aspired to the older model of 

cosmopolitan, literary travel, even as they served as guidebooks for the rising numbers of 

American tourists, Twain’s Innocents Abroad is avowedly touristic through and through. 

One thing that separated the Quaker City pleasure cruise from the extended tours 

of earlier travelers was its ambitious itinerary. This was no residence in European society 

but a comprehensively scheduled tour of all of the Old World’s obligatory sights.
8
 

Although the Quaker City cruise was a luxury only available to the very wealthy (or 

famous), its passengers did not enjoy the relaxed Grand Tour of their earlier counterparts. 

The itinerary of exciting places that opens the book is so extensive that, even though the 

cruise is to last several months, the party will spend no more than several days in most 

places. In fact, the phrase “a stay of one or two days” is repeated almost like a refrain 

                                                 
8
 As Lawrence I. Berkove notes, “Wherever the Americans went, they had to cope with 

the frustration of ‘doing’ a place on a tight schedule” (192). Twain summarizes the 

appeal this program had for the Quaker City passengers: “Paris, England, Scotland, 

Switzerland, Italy—Garibaldi! The Grecian archipelago! Vesuvius! Constantinople! 

Smyrna! The Holy Land! Egypt and “our friends the Bermudians”! People in Europe 

desiring to join the Excursion—contagious sickness to be avoided—boating at the 

expense of the ship—physician on board—the circuit of the globe to be made if the 

passengers unanimously desired it” (23).  



 

246 

throughout the program, emphasizing that the pilgrims will arrive at each location, check 

off the main sights in their guidebooks, and then be quickly shuttled along to the next 

point of interest.  

Another feature of a luxury cruise is that travelers need not bother themselves 

with the small details of navigating the culture and customs of each place they visit. As 

the excursion’s program states, “The ship will at all times be a home, where the 

excursionists, if sick, will be surrounded by kind friends, and have all possible comfort 

and sympathy,” and “[p]assengers can remain on board of the steamer, at all ports, if they 

desire, without additional expense” (22-23). A vetturino lessens the need for negotiating 

the local language to procure food and lodgings, but a pleasure cruise makes it 

unnecessary even to stay within many of the cities visited. The travelers will never truly 

be away from home because their floating home aboard the Quaker City will be an 

American oasis of familiarity in the midst of the potential strangeness of Europe. 

As his time abroad increases, even Twain realizes how restrictive such rapid and 

preordained touring can be.
9
 While visiting Russia nearly three months into the trip, 

Twain reports, “we consulted the guide-books and were rejoiced to know that there were 

no sights in Odessa to see; and so we had one good, untrammeled holyday on our hands, 

with nothing to do but idle about the city and enjoy ourselves” (388). Of course, this jab 

at touring fits Twain’s lazy and sacrilegious persona, but it also suggests how such a 

stringent itinerary can prevent the traveler from appreciating the opportunity to simply be 

                                                 
9
 Melton summarizes Twain’s disillusionment: “Twain marvels in his first exposure to 

the foreign, but his enthusiasm quickly wanes and his subsequent struggles between the 

beauty of his expectations and the too-often dismal reality mimic the struggle of tourists 

at large to reconcile the contrasts between the ‘authentic’ pictures in front of them and the 

delicately crafted images in their minds” (66). 



 

247 

in a new place. In all likelihood, their form of idling, which includes “saunter[ing] 

through the markets,” “criticis[ing] the fearful and wonderful costumes from the back 

country,” and “examin[ing] the populace as far as eyes could do it” incorporates more 

actual observation of foreign culture than the meaningless parade of galleries, churches, 

and statuary that otherwise occupies the pilgrims’ time (388). 

 

Continuing the trend examined in the previous chapter, foreign language in 

Innocents Abroad is no longer a valuable conveyor of cultural content but a comical 

source of annoyance and confusion. But luckily for Twain and his traveling companions, 

the rise of tourism makes learning new languages unnecessary. Indeed, when moving 

from country to country at such a rapid pace, speaking every local language would be 

nearly impossible.
10

 Although Twain often satirizes American tourists, there is no 

indication in Innocents Abroad that he finds the linguistic skill of earlier travelers at all 

admirable or desirable. Previous travelers like Taylor aspired to the status of 

cosmopolites well versed in the languages of Europe, even if they did not achieve it. 

Although Twain spends much time calling attention to the language barrier and to 

amusing anecdotes of miscommunication, his work lacks the conviction that, whatever 

difficulties foreign language might present, there is inherent worth in multilingualism. 

                                                 
10

 As Larzer Ziff argues, Twain’s lack of interest in language acquisition is part of the 

shift from older modes of travel to tourism: “The tour was laid out in advance and Twain 

embarked on it because everything had been prepared for him. He didn’t know the 

language of any country he visited and his foreign acquaintanceship was limited to 

guides, hoteliers, waiters, and shopkeepers. At no point did he pretend otherwise or wish 

to alter this condition” (Return 185). 



 

248 

One target of Twain’s comic treatment of foreign language in Innocents Abroad is 

the Americans’ failed attempts to communicate in the local languages. As David R. 

Sewell notes, “The ‘innocence’ Twain examines in The Innocents Abroad is in part 

linguistic incompetence. The Americans cannot speak a comprehensible sentence in any 

of the languages they encounter” (59-60). For example, the party’s excursion to Paris 

inspires many jokes about the pretention of American travelers attempting and failing to 

speak French. One French boatman is apparently unable to understand the Americans’ 

butchered version of his own language. Twain jokes, “He appeared to be very ignorant of 

French” (93). A similar scene occurs with a French waitress: 

The doctor said:  

“Avez vous du vin?”  

The dame looked perplexed. The doctor said again, with elaborate 

distinctness of articulation:  

“Avez-vous du—vin!”  

The dame looked more perplexed than before. I said:  

“Doctor, there is a flaw in your pronunciation somewhere. Let me try 

her. Madame, avez-vous du vin?—It isn't any use, doctor—take the 

witness.”  

“Madame, avez-vous du vin—ou fromage—pain—pickled pigs’ 

feet—beurre—des œufs—du beuf—horse-radish, sour-crout, hog and 

hominy—any thing, any thing in the world that can stay a Christian 

stomach!”  

She said:  

“Bless you, why didn’t you speak English before?—I don’t know any 

thing about your plagued French!” (94) 

The joke itself is hardly original, but this scene differs from previous jabs at uncultured 

Americans in that there is nothing obviously wrong with the French as printed. This is not 

Cooper’s critique of “Nully” or “Notter Dam” (Homeward Bound I: 188-89). Instead, 

Twain indicates that even the basic, conversational French that should be recognizable to 

most readers is so hopelessly mangled as to be incomprehensible to a Parisian. (After all, 

“Avez vous du vin?” is a phrase anyone but the most stringent advocate of temperance 



 

249 

would learn before traveling to France.) Garbling the French in some way would place 

the doctor and Twain below the level of an even marginally cultured reader, making the 

American tourists objects of scorn for their excessive innocence. But, by suggesting that 

there is something wrong with a tolerable and apparently correct attempt to speak French, 

Twain questions the worth of learning the most basic phrases in a foreign country. Even 

readers who might understand the French in this exchange are placed on the same level as 

Twain’s doctor. 

Rather than lament the futility of communication with the locals, Twain further 

suggests that meaningful exchange is not really the point of travel anyway. Throughout 

the section, one traveler, Dan, is subjected to the derision of his party for preferring 

English over attempts at French. Twain, in contrast, favors the romance of speaking 

terrible French, even at the expense of useful information: 

We never did succeed in making any body understand just exactly what 

we wanted, and neither did we ever succeed in comprehending just exactly 

what they said in reply—but then they always pointed—they always did 

that, and we bowed politely and said, “Merci, Monsieur,” and so it was a 

blighting triumph over the disaffected member [Dan], any way. (95-96) 

The French language is part of the atmosphere the pilgrims have come to experience, and 

they are unwilling to forego using it, even if it leaves them wandering aimlessly through 

the streets. And Dan’s alternative does not entail speaking the local language, either. He 

simply prefers that they take advantage of the innumerable Parisians who can speak 

English. Twain offers no ideal of foreign language acquisition—only the choice between 

insensible ambience or a retreat to monolingualism. 

Later, Twain’s multi-edged satire cuts back against the pretention of attempting to 

speak the languages of Europe when he mocks traveling Americans who “have actually 



 

250 

forgotten their mother tongue in three months” and “can not even write their address in 

English in a hotel register” (233). He provides the following example of such effrontery: 

 “John P. Whitcomb, Etats Unis.  

“Wm. L. Ainsworth, travailleur (he meant traveler, I suppose,) Etats 

Unis.  

“George P. Morton et fils, d’Amerique.  

. . . . . 

I love this sort of people. A lady passenger of ours tells of a fellow-

citizen of hers who spent eight weeks in Paris and then returned home and 

addressed his dearest old bosom friend Herbert as Mr. “Er-bare!” (233-34) 

While Twain may understand the desire to experience the local language as romantic 

ambience, he has no sympathy for those who wear their new-found linguistic ability as a 

badge of pride. Making mistakes with European language is amiably comic, but the 

linguistic pretention of using French when English will serve deserves true derision. For 

Twain, it is an even greater sin than the behavior typically attributed to “ugly 

Americans.” He asserts, “It is not pleasant to see an American thrusting his nationality 

forward obtrusively in a foreign land, but Oh, it is pitiable to see him making of himself 

. . . a poor, miserable, hermaphrodite Frenchman!” (234-35). However, Twain departs 

from Cooper’s critique of Dodge’s similar pretention by neither distinguishing between 

good and bad French, nor suggesting that there could be any legitimate reason to use a 

foreign term instead of an English one. There seems to be no possibility of effective yet 

unpretentious language learning. Any attempts at speaking French, or any European 

language, are either comically incomprehensible or utterly obnoxious.
11

  

                                                 
11

 Of course, jokes like the passages quoted above require some rudimentary knowledge 

of French to understand, but Twain once again differs from Cooper in degree. Not only is 

Twain’s “broken French” accessible without a particularly thorough or correct 

understanding of the language, but Twain also fails to offer the reader a model of real 

linguistic skill such as Paul Powis, Eve Effingham, or Cooper himself. In Twain, there is 



 

251 

Not only does it seem futile for American travelers to attempt to learn European 

languages, but Europeans’ attempts at speaking or writing English are doomed to equal 

failure. One such example follows a Franglish note Twain’s comic sidekick, Blucher, 

writes to a Parisian landlord, including lines such as “Monsieur le Landlord—Sir: 

Pourquoi don't you mettez some savon in your bed-chambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I 

will steal it?” (189).
12

 Immediately afterward, Twain provides a specimen of the mangled 

English of Italy: 

“NOTISH.”  

“This hotel which the best it is in Italy and most superb, is handsome 

locate on the best situation of the lake, with the most splendid view near 

the Villas Melzy, to the King of Belgian, and Serbelloni. This hotel have 

recently enlarge, do offer all commodities on moderate price, at the 

strangers gentlemen who whish spend the seasons on the Lake Come.”  

How is that, for a specimen? In the hotel is a handsome little chapel 

where an English clergyman is employed to preach to such of the guests of 

the house as hail from England and America, and this fact is also set forth 

in barbarous English in the same advertisement. Wouldn’t you have 

supposed that the adventurous linguist who framed the card would have 

known enough to submit it to that clergyman before he sent it to the 

printer? (189-90) 

                                                                                                                                                 

no contrast of proper and improper use of foreign language; it is always laughable or 

pretentious. 

12
 Dewey Ganzel describes how the figure of Blucher grew out of Twain’s earlier comic 

sidekick, Brown, and explains, “Brown-Blucher was, in fact, a caricature of Clemens 

himself, or at least that part of him which was still neophyte, and as such a means—

through contrast—for making the other projection of Clemens, the persona ‘Mark 

Twain,’ appear more sophisticated” (72). But while “Mark Twain” may be more 

intelligent and urbane than Brown-Blucher, he is not considerably more worldly. Twain 

may be able to understand the differences of Europe and comport himself with a higher 

degree of polish, but he is far from cosmopolitan, and comes no closer to seeing any 

sense in the foreign than his ignorant sidekick. As William W. Stowe argues, Twain 

represents “a middling range of American men, neither boors nor aesthetes, neither 

plutocrats nor workers, but common-sense middle-class democrats determined to see and 

judge the Old World for themselves and to act out their senses of themselves and of their 

place in their society and culture” (129). 



 

252 

The basic content of this advertisement is understandable, but only by a slim margin. The 

juxtaposition of these two documents makes it clear that Twain criticizes all attempts at 

multilingualism. He thus avoids the common, narrow-minded assumption that foreigners 

should be under a greater obligation to speak proper English than Americans are to speak 

other languages. For Twain, all attempts to speak in a foreign language are liable to 

produce “barbarous” nonsense.  

Twain also uses these examples to highlight foreign grammar as a major source of 

linguistic confusion. Sewell finds that, despite Twain’s frequent jokes about the subject, 

he demonstrates a clear “allegiance to prescriptive grammar,” and “his deep respect for 

the authority of grammar, even when he kicks against it, leads him to an implicit 

formulation . . . : grammar is power” (16, 35). In varieties of American English as well as 

second languages, proper grammar (or the lack thereof) is a mark of class and regional 

belonging. A non-native speaker’s grammatical mistakes thus emphasize how language 

marks the boundaries of a national community, just as the dialects in Twain’s fiction are 

markers of both region and class. Perhaps some of the errors in the Italian advertisement 

could have been corrected by the English-speaking priest, but Twain implies that all 

attempts to speak a second language will indelibly mark one’s origin. In Innocents 

Abroad, in contrast to earlier works like Cooper’s Homeward Bound, there is little chance 

of being mistaken for a native speaker. One may perhaps peek over the linguistic barrier, 

but it can never fully be breached. For Twain, as will become increasingly clear, this 

failure is at least partially desirable because it strengthens the boundaries between 

nations. 

 



 

253 

Most significantly, Innocents Abroad demonstrates how, when European 

language is stripped of all content and significance, the American tourist begins to view 

European culture with the disregard previously reserved for “savage” peoples. For 

example, rather than learn the languages of Europe, Twain resorts to renaming the 

unintelligible and unpronounceable, as in the running joke of calling all foreign guides 

“Ferguson.” Twain begins this practice in France, when one guide’s actual name, 

“Billfinger,” like Dan’s unromantic yet efficacious English, does not seem French 

enough (120). Later in the trip, however, Twain discusses a guide in Constantinople who, 

“[a]fter he has gotten himself up regardless of expense, in showy, baggy trowsers, 

yellow, pointed slippers, fiery fez, silken jacket of blue . . . considers it an unspeakable 

humiliation to be called Ferguson” (381). The pretension of such an ostentatious costume 

would be reason enough to mock the guide by renaming him Ferguson, but Twain further 

explains, “It can not be helped. All guides are Fergusons to us. We can not master their 

dreadful foreign names” (381). Twain implies that foreign words and names are not only 

difficult to learn and to comprehend, but that they are somehow inherently awful. 

Similarly, when Twain and his companions camp near “Temnin-el-Foka,” they rename it 

“Jacksonville,” which Twain admits “sounds a little strangely, here in the Valley of 

Lebanon, but it has the merit of being easier to remember than the Arabic name” (438). 

Twain’s rampant renaming effaces all trace of the local language and culture. Like 

Columbus in the Caribbean, Twain christens people and places anew at his own 

convenience, showing no respect for their native designations.
13

 

                                                 
13

 Caesar also calls attention to the importance of this trope, but he sees it as a 

representation of Twain’s authorial power: “The guides are all re-named Ferguson, rather 

as a comic trope for the fact that Twain re-names himself as an American. . . . [H]e re-



 

254 

Indeed, just as Columbus failed to recognize the speech of the native Caribbeans 

as a legitimate language, Twain implies that anything other than American English is at 

least slightly ridiculous. For example, he jokes, “(They spell it Vinci and pronounce it 

Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce)” (185). Here, as elsewhere, it 

is obvious that such a comment is not entirely in earnest, but the joke implies, 

nevertheless, that foreign rules of pronunciation are somehow less valid than those of 

English, and particularly those of American English. Similarly, Twain describes how 

“distances in the East are measured by hours, not miles” (525), and complains of the 

trouble this new system of measurement gives him: 

This method of computation is bothersome and annoying; and until one 

gets thoroughly accustomed to it, it carries no intelligence to his mind 

until he has stopped and translated the pagan hours into Christian miles, 

just as people do with the spoken words of a foreign language they are 

acquainted with, but not familiarly enough to catch the meaning in a 

moment. (525) 

Making a clear analogy to linguistic translation, Twain calls attention to the difficulty of 

converting one system of meaning into another, the inherent incommensurability of 

cross-cultural exchange. Twain also implies that his own system of measurement is both 

more natural and simply better by joking, “I can not be positive about it, but I think that 

there, when a man orders a pair of pantaloons, he says he wants them a quarter of a 

minute in the legs and nine seconds around the waist” (525). Once again, Twain not only 

describes the difficulty of adapting to foreign language and customs, but he also uses 

such incongruous switching of sign systems to subtly convince readers that foreign 

customs are inherently ridiculous.  

                                                                                                                                                 

tropes himself—in part by seizing the power of those who would guide him and by 

reducing them all to the same figure, thus restoring his own power” (35). 



 

255 

Similar play with incommensurability can be seen in Twain’s reactions to 

different systems of currency. When the party first arrives in the Azores, for example, 

Blucher throws a lavish dinner and then becomes mortified at the check. Twain exclaims, 

“‘TOTAL, TWENTY-ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED REIS!’ The suffering Moses!—there 

ain’t money enough in the ship to pay that bill!” (52). The punch line of the joke, of 

course, is that such a large number translates into a mere 21.70 in American dollars. Later 

in Tangier, Twain sends up a similarly unbalanced exchange rate by describing how one 

passenger, by attempting to change a napoleon, had “swamped the bank; had bought 

eleven quarts of coin, and the head of the firm had gone on the street to negotiate for the 

balance of the change” (81). Twain then remarks that he “bought nearly half a pint of 

their money for a shilling” (81). Once again, the humor of these anecdotes comes from 

the incongruity of replacing one system of measurement with another, volume for amount 

or time for distance. Twain makes the foreign seem both carnivalesque and silly by up-

ending what Americans perceive as the “normal” ways of measuring things. Of course all 

of these examples have been couched as jokes rather than earnest deprecations of foreign 

language and custom, but the aggregate effect of these jokes has a subtle, or not so subtle, 

effect of positioning what is American as normal and logical in contrast to the absurdity 

of the foreign. 

Twain’s constant belittling of the foreign also results in an elevation of the 

domestic. Thus, not only does Twain’s “innocent” perspective embrace the linguistic 

isolationism that would declare unblushingly, “‘Hotel d’Europe!’ . . . was all the Italian I 

knew, and I was not certain whether that was Italian or French” (248), but it also results 

in a more pervasive if more subtle argument for American exceptionalism and cultural 



 

256 

centrism. There is little self-deprecating irony, for example, in Twain’s litany of the 

American traveler’s complaints: 

We are getting foreignized rapidly, and with facility. We are getting 

reconciled to halls and bed-chambers with unhomelike stone floors and no 

carpets—floors that ring to the tread of one’s heels with a sharpness that is 

death to sentimental musing. . . . We are getting used to driving right into 

the central court of the hotel, in the midst of a fragrant circle of vines and 

flowers, and in the midst, also, of parties of gentlemen sitting quietly 

reading the paper and smoking. We are getting used to ice frozen by 

artificial process in ordinary bottles—the only kind of ice they have here. 

We are getting used to all these things; but we are not getting used to 

carrying our own soap. (98) 

Twain calls getting used to such things “getting foreignized,” but his supposed tolerance 

is accompanied by the constant recognition that European customs are in many ways 

inferior to what the Americans are used to at home. Moreover, the one thing Twain says 

they cannot tolerate, the lack of soap, becomes another running joke at the expense of the 

foreign. Again and again, Twain plays on Europeans’ ignorance of soap, saying of the 

Marseillaise, for example, that “they make half the fancy toilet soap we consume in 

America, but . . . only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained 

from books of travel, just as they have acquired an uncertain notion of clean shirts, and 

the peculiarities of the gorilla, and other curious matters” (189). Beneath this recurring 

joke more than any other is an undercurrent of American superiority—a cleanliness close 

to Godliness. It is no surprise, then, that the repeated calls for soap often occur in 

mutilated bits of European language such as “Here, cospetto! corpo di Bacco! 

Sacramento! Solferino!—Soap, you son of a gun!” (188). Americans may lack linguistic 

competence, but at least they have adequate ideas of hygiene.
14

 Indeed, such stereotypes 

                                                 
14

 As David W. Levy argues, “the Europe that Twain presented to his readers and held up 

to derision was degenerate, superstitious, degraded, and filthy; its best days were behind 



 

257 

continue to this day as justification for American tourists’ feelings of superiority, despite 

their comparative linguistic ignorance.  

 In the end, what is most significant about Innocents Abroad is not the touristic 

travel necessitated by the Quaker City’s ambitious itinerary, but how the persona of Mark 

Twain enshrines the shortcomings tourism encourages into an ideal of linguistic and 

cultural ignorance. As implied by Twain’s avowed purpose, “to suggest to the reader how 

he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes 

instead of the eyes of those who travelled in those countries before him” (v), the author 

does not write from a position of greater culture and cosmopolitanism than his readers, as 

James Fenimore Cooper or Margaret Fuller had done. Instead, he gives untraveled 

readers the same uncultured impressions that they would have if they were abroad, 

nationalistically affirming everything American in contrast to the absurdities of the 

foreign.
15

 Twain does not, therefore, proclaim to have gained significant elevation by his 

extensive travel—experience and wisdom worth sharing with readers at home. He instead 

experiences each sight anew as an “innocent” fresh from the American frontier. Twain’s 

critiques of European language and culture may be humorous, but his claim to represent 

                                                                                                                                                 

it. Americans had no cause to drop their eyes and blush at comparisons between their 

country and the Old World” (92). 

15
 As Malcolm Bradbury describes, Twain “presumes that very little in Europe will match 

America’s natural wonder and democratic splendour,” and in this “comedy of assumed 

innocence” everything he experiences is “sifted through the filter of his simple Western 

vision” (167). For J.D. Stahl, the “complicated and troublesome character of Mark 

Twain’s stance” lies in his “implicit claim to representativeness” (Culture 29). John C. 

McCloskey takes a more ambivalent, if not totally contradictory view, arguing that 

“Twain admires and gawks like any other tourist, and when he makes negative judgments 

it is often on far different grounds from the assumed ignorance of a coonskin Jacksonian 

catering to the ignorance of the mob” (141).  



 

258 

the vision of any one of his countrymen suggests that no American should take foreign 

culture any more seriously than he does. 

Peter Messent attributes the popularity of Innocents Abroad to this narrow 

perspective, describing “the very assertive and new sense of American national identity 

which it, in part, promotes” (Cambridge 42). Manfred Pütz offers an even more critical 

perspective of the book’s hegemonic power: 

While Innocents Abroad looks on the surface like a harmless, humorous 

description of early American tourist experiences, the book also reveals 

itself on another level as a potentially explosive mixture of aggressive 

culture bashing and cultural nationalism, American debunking and 

American self-celebration, similar to what fuelled the fantasies of 

proponents of American imperialism on a political plane. (220) 

Twain’s satire targets both the fraudulent grandeur of the Old World’s famous sights and 

the sanctimonious pretention of American tourists, but his moments of self-deprecation 

ultimately fail to deflate the dangerous nationalism that Pütz describes, just as his satire 

of American tourists proves no less touristic than the travelers it targets.
16

 Likewise, 

                                                 
16

 Berkove summarizes this dual satire: “While Innocents Abroad was mainly appreciated 

for its refreshingly humorous and sceptical view of the Old World, also present in the 

book is its cold undercurrent of criticism of the tourists for their sanctimoniousness, 

hypocrisy and small-mindedness, and of Americans as well as Old World people for their 

common venality and parochialism” (193). Nevertheless, Brian Yothers describes how 

the dichotomy between Twain’s own persona and the American travelers he criticizes 

collapses: “Twain undermines the dichotomy between deluded pilgrims who read their 

own meanings into the landscape and the plainspoken American Everyman who relates 

the experience of Holy Land travel to his readers in the precise form that they themselves 

would use for their own accounts. Twain’s persona is seen to be reliant on the very 

accounts that he exposes as utterly ridiculous, and his reader is able to see that the 

ultimate distinction between Twain and previous travelers is one of degree rather than 

kind” (Romance 105). Similarly, Forrest G. Robinson argues, “Mark Twain is impatient 

with inflated travel writing, but indulges himself at intervals in the very style he deplores. 

He is critical of other tourists for their blind surrender to romantic impressions, yet 

cannot conceal the fact that historical melodramas, not to mention popular travel books, 

have influenced his own expectations and responses” ( “Innocent” 30). 



 

259 

although Twain follows Cooper in his critique of linguistic pretention, and, as a humorist, 

Twain finds absurdity everywhere, he offers no cosmopolitan counter-example of using 

linguistic difference to express precise cultural meanings. Learning a language is 

difficult, speaking it like a native is impossible, and there is little benefit to 

accomplishing either. Thus, while earlier generations of Americans still looked on 

European culture with respect, even while placing themselves far above the “savage” 

peoples encountered in the nation’s expansion, Innocents Abroad depicts a growing 

attitude that, in comparison to American attributes like simplicity, cleanliness, and 

efficiency, Europeans can be just as barbarous as South Sea savages. Twain critiques the 

pretentious display of European language and culture as an empty sign of cultural 

superiority, but he does little to differentiate fetishized cultural commodities from the real 

cultural value of Europe. Indeed, it is uncertain if he even believes the latter to exist. 

Awful European Language in A Tramp Abroad 

Twain’s second book of European travel, A Tramp Abroad (1880), goes beyond 

the burlesque of tourism found in Innocents Abroad to look deeper at issues of language 

and translation. From 1878 to 1879, Clemens and his family once again traveled to 

Europe, visiting Germany, Italy, and France (Baetzhold 35). The primary purpose of the 

trip was to write a new travel book, and Clemens had a contract with publisher Frank 

Bliss to do so (Hellwig 80).
17

 However, the account of the trip published in A Tramp 

                                                 
17

 Most commentators are critical of the resulting narrative’s lack of coherence, agreeing 

with Everett Emerson’s assessment that “nothing holds the book together except the 

binding” (115). Many critics also join Richard Bridgman in characterizing the book as an 

“uneven performance” (70). Harold H. Hellwig calls it “notable for its flights of greatness 

and its moments of tedium,” adding, “Structurally it is weak, . . . lack[ing] one clear 

focus” (83). Similarly, Berkove concludes, “A mixture of the ludicrous and the factual, A 



 

260 

Abroad is even more fictionalized than that of Innocents Abroad. As Harold H. Hellwig 

points out, “the narrator seems to be a bachelor who wishes to learn German, and to study 

art” (81), a sharp contrast to the married writer traveling for material. But like his 

fictional persona, Clemens also aimed to learn German.
18

 A Tramp Abroad contains 

several admissions of his increased, though limited, knowledge. For example, at the 

Mannheim opera, Twain notes that, while he “understood nothing that was uttered on the 

distant stage,” he did understand two women speaking privately nearby (87). Elsewhere 

he explains, “I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it 

best through an interpreter” (125). While there is some debate over Clemens’s degree of 

success with the language, most agree that he was unable to master it.
19

 Although 

                                                                                                                                                 

Tramp Abroad is entertaining but not gripping. Its organization is loose to begin with and 

is further weakened by individual episodes having little or nothing to do with the 

pedestrian tour” (198). Peter Messent (Cambridge 46-47) and Robert Sattelmeyer (262), 

however, find more value in the work. 

18
 Clemens began his lifelong study of German in his youth (Krumpelmann 1), and his 

wife began to learn the language in 1871 (Kersten 203). In preparation for his 1878 trip, 

moreover, Clemens “hired a German nurse named Rosina Hay, and the whole family 

began to study the German language” (Scott 91). 

19
 Arthur L. Scott goes on to note that, although Clemens “strewed German words and 

phrases throughout his notebooks,” eventually he found that “[h]e just could not write 

and study at the same time, so he dropped German” (91). John T. Krumpelmann 

concludes that “Mark Twain was really acquiring an ability to read German,” but admits 

that “[w]ith the spoken word he made less progress” (4-5). Interestingly, Robert 

Sattelmeyer compares Twain’s interest in learning German to his literary predecessors: 

“It was this language and this learning, broadly conceived, which had nourished the 

generation of Harvard-educated New England writers and intellectuals whom Twain had 

burlesqued in his Whittier birthday speech, and which was still exerting a powerful 

influence on American intellectual life a half century later. Moving to Heidelberg and 

taking up the study of German not only replicated the actions of several generations of 

American students but also paid a peculiar homage to the New England literary culture to 

which Mark Twain stood in such clear contrast” (267). Twain generally turns against this 

older tradition, but his interest in German is one counterexample. 



 

261 

Clemens devoted much time to his project of learning German, he could never gain the 

fluency of travelers like Cooper, Taylor, or Fuller.  

In spite of this progress in foreign language education, A Tramp Abroad contains 

many of the same jokes about cross-cultural communication found in Innocents. When 

Twain goes to see “‘King Lear’ played in German,” for example, he claims: “It was a 

mistake. We sat in our seats three whole hours and never understood anything but the 

thunder and lightning; and even that was reversed to suit German ideas, for the thunder 

came first and the lightning followed after” (83). Not only does this complaint mirror 

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s comments about the impossibility of translating Shakespeare 

into any other language, but the joke about the reversed lightning and thunder echoes 

Twain’s numerous jabs at German grammar, making the entire production seem both 

incomprehensible and ridiculous. A Tramp Abroad also reprises the Innocents joke that 

Europeans can understand English better than they can understand Twain’s terrible 

renditions of their native languages. For example, Harris warns, “Speak in German,—

these Germans may understand English” (103). Another familiar joke is the bad English 

of foreign materials designed for tourists. Reproducing “A Catalogue of Pictures in the 

Old Pinacotek,” Twain comments about the word choice of “‘Susan bathing, surprised by 

the two old man. In the background the lapidation of the condemned’” (148). 

Parenthetically, Twain adds, “‘Lapidation’ is good; it is much more elegant than 

‘stoning.’” (148). In addition to its bad grammar, this “peculiar kind of English” commits 

the cardinal sin, for Twain, of making pretentious what could be said simply and more 



 

262 

eloquently (148).
20

 Clearly, A Tramp Abroad continues many of the linguistic jokes 

found throughout Twain’s first travelogue. 

Moreover, Twain is again quite critical of European customs. For example, he 

complains of the rudeness of Baden-Baden shopkeepers, “especially,” as “an English 

gentleman who had been living there several years” reports, “to ladies of your nationality 

and mine” (200). One frequent target of true scorn is foreign food. After an exaggerated 

lambasting of European fare, particularly of cream and coffee, Twain reports, “There is 

here and there an American who will say he can remember rising from a European table 

d’ hôte perfectly satisfied; but we must not overlook the fact that there is also here and 

there an American who will lie” (573). Underlying all such examples is the strong sense 

of nationalism expressed in the book’s conclusion: 

On the whole, I think that short visits to Europe are better for us than long 

ones. The former preserve us from becoming Europeanized; they keep our 

pride of country intact, and at the same time they intensify our affection 

for our country and our people; whereas long visits have the effect of 

dulling those feelings,—at least in the majority of cases. (580) 

While Cooper’s travels in Europe caused him to return to America with a sharpened eye 

for his own country’s shortcomings, albeit with an accompanying desire to see those 

shortcomings remedied, Twain advocates travel for the purpose of making all the 

                                                 
20

 At times, the jokes seem even more familiar, as in an encounter with another boatman. 

Twain’s terrible German is incomprehensible while his companion’s English (“Can man 

boat get here?”) is easily understood, partly because it contains so many German 

cognates (163). 



 

263 

customs of home seem even more dear—making them seem all the more like the only 

rational practices in an insane world.
21

  

As in his previous travelogue, Twain in A Tramp Abroad is what Jeffrey Alan 

Melton calls the “consummate leisured tourist, a man of his gilded age” (83).
22

 In contrast 

to earlier travelers such as Cooper, who highly valued the history and culture of Europe, 

as well as transitional figures such as Taylor, who, if failing to achieve the true 

cosmopolitanism of their predecessors, still aspired to the older model of literary world 

citizen, Twain mocks those who find the culture of Europe worthy of admiration and 

emulation. Moreover, the true target of Twain’s critique is not necessarily the particulars 

of European culture, but the act of imitation itself, and, in a way, this is what makes his 

attitude toward linguistic and cultural difference even more isolationist. Rather than 

Cooper’s cosmopolitan, but still patriotic, desire to find the best of both sides of the 

Atlantic, Twain adheres to what Pauline Kleingeld describes as the “nationalist manner” 

of viewing patriotism as “unconditional loyalty to one’s own national community (taken 

as a linguistic and/or cultural community)” (21-22). As Twain implies throughout A 

Tramp Abroad, this loyalty requires a kind of Emersonian self-reliance on national 

attitudes, as expressed in the national language. There is no need to speak to foreigners 

                                                 
21

 As Scott argues, Twain is an example of Fuller’s “conceited American,” rejecting any 

insight that visiting Europe could provide in favor of an overbearing pride in all things 

American (66). 

22
 Moreover, as Messent argues, “Mass tourism and Twain’s own status as tourist . . . 

have even greater emphasis in this text than in Innocents Abroad. Here, he explicitly 

mocks the sensitive traveller—with her or his delicate awareness of the education to be 

gained from a foreign culture . . . and the elitist tendencies that accompany the separation 

from the general tourist mass” (Cambridge 47). 



 

264 

while dashing from sight to sight on the beaten track because all valuable ideas come 

from within and at home. 

 

One important difference from Innocents Abroad, however, is that A Tramp 

Abroad pays more attention to foreign language, if only to show its ludicrousness. Just as 

he mocked the American travelers who turned themselves into “hermaphrodite 

Frenchmen,” Twain lampoons travel writers who include bits of untranslated foreign 

language in their works. He does not mention any particular authors, but this practice 

could easily be listed as one of James Fenimore Cooper’s “literary offenses.” When 

Twain does not wish to travel to the “Furka Region” of the Alps, he sends his agent 

Harris, who makes an official report peppered with foreign words and phrases (312).
23

 

Harris begins normally enough by describing his arrival “at the maison on the Furka in a 

little under quatre hours,” but quickly devolves into such nonsense as, “we formed a 

large xhvloj as we descended the steg which winds round the shoulder of a mountain 

toward the Rhone Glacier” (312). After nearly a hundred of such foreign inclusions, some 

of them recognizable French and German, others obvious gibberish, Twain criticizes the 

document for being “much too learned” (320). When Harris explains, “Dingblatter is a 

Fiji word meaning ‘degrees,’” Twain counters, “You knew the English of it, then?” 

(320). Twain repeatedly complains that Harris’s foreign words express the same concepts 

as their English equivalents. Such inclusions may be pretentious, but Twain, in contrast to 

Cooper and Melville, can imagine no conceptual nuance that might be more precisely 

                                                 
23

 David M. Wrobel identifies this scenario as satire of “the entire travel/adventure 

writing genre,” making the book “an anti-travel narrative of sorts” (23). 



 

265 

expressed with a foreign term. Unlike the Polynesian “taboo,” which, as Melville makes 

clear, cannot be translated literally into an English equivalent, it is always possible for 

Harris to “[know] the English of it.” As in Redburn’s youthful daydreams of travel, 

linguistic difference becomes an empty sign of foreignness when it conveys no 

substantive conceptual difference; the rare phrase of foreign language acquired from 

travel is just as substance-less as any cheap and mass-produced souvenir. 

In the diatribe that follows Harris’s account, Twain criticizes authors who include 

untranslated foreign phrases, both those whose genuine erudition eclipses the 

understanding of most readers, and those who insert such phrases not because they better 

express a concept but because they lend the text a false air of cosmopolitanism. For 

Twain, anything foreign should be immediately translated, or better yet, languages other 

than English should be avoided altogether. As Twain says elsewhere: 

I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language 

and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the author considers me 

able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite a nice compliment,—

but if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without 

the compliment. (146) 

Twain implies that he, like many American readers, is neither comfortable with reading 

foreign languages nor interested in becoming so. It is the job of the author to provide his 

reader with a translation so that no advanced knowledge of other languages is necessary 

and no further learning is encouraged.
24

 Once again, this preference contrasts sharply 

with the practice of Cooper and his contemporaries, who recognized a cultural content to 

                                                 
24

 To prove his point, Twain undertakes his own translation of “The Lorelei” in order “to 

give the un-German young girl a jingle of words to hang the tune on until she can get 

hold of a good version” (146). Despite this disclaimer, Twain’s translation is, according 

to Scott, “smooth, poetic, and readily singable” (104). 



 

266 

foreign language that resisted translation, a remainder of meaning lost in the transfer 

between languages. Rather than viewing translation as a stopgap measure and a gateway 

to further study, ideally with some foreign words still included to convey culturally 

specific concepts (as Cooper argues of “township” and “ville” in Gleanings in Europe), 

Twain sees translation as an adequate substitute for the foreign, with no loss of any 

meaning that might be valuable to an American audience. 

Another way to view Twain’s more extensive treatment of foreign language in A 

Tramp Abroad is through the parallel goals the narrator gives for his parody of a typical 

European tour. Within a few paragraphs, Twain describes his plans to “undertake a 

journey through Europe on foot,” “to study art,” and “to learn the German language” 

(1).
25

 His seriousness in these undertakings is immediately undermined, however, by the 

failure of his pedestrian aspirations. In this first iteration of a joke repeated throughout 

the narrative, the travelers make “preparations for a long pedestrian trip . . . but at the last 

moment [change] the program, for private reasons, and [take] the express train” (17). 

Larzer Ziff calls this “running gag” an “apparent allusion” to Taylor’s Views A-Foot 

(Return 202).
26

 Even Taylor’s pedestrian tour showed evidence of the increasingly 

touristic nature of American travel, but Twain takes Taylor’s lack of engagement with 

                                                 
25

 According to Everett Emerson, these “three themes” are the only constants that 

“provide some unity” to the otherwise disjointed narrative (115). While I am not so quick 

to criticize Twain’s work as a whole, Emerson’s verdict does suggest that the 

commentary on learning German in A Tramp Abroad is best understood in the context of 

Twain’s other goals. 

26
 Scott (112) and Melton (81) both examine the personal connection between Twain and 

Taylor. Krumpelmann describes a letter in German that Twain wrote to Taylor, who, as 

described in the previous chapter, was well known as a scholar of German language and 

literature (2). 



 

267 

local culture even further. The new forms of transportation to which Twain switches at 

every opportunity are at least partially responsible for the tourist boom. Moreover, as 

James Buzard argues, the concept of “place” fostered by such rapid transportation 

distinguishes tourism from travel on an ideological level, encouraging tourists to “impose 

fixed limits on accustomed attractions and stops, and to imagine the areas between them 

as somehow ‘empty,’ as unworthy of attention” (34).
27

 By jumping on a passenger car to 

get from point A to point B, Twain similarly compartmentalizes the attractions of Europe, 

focusing on a series of itinerary stops instead of on the real cultural life in-between.  

Twain’s jesting with European art also highlights many of the key themes raised 

by foreign language, including issues of representation and the conventions of travel 

literature. Twain contributes several examples of his artistic “progress” to the illustrations 

of the book, including sketches of “a military tower, 115 feet high” with a 

disproportionate man sitting atop it, a “Etruscan tear-jug,” and an “Henri II. plate” (104, 

185). In his book Traveling in Mark Twain, Richard Bridgman seems utterly unable to 

offer any explanation for Twain’s various drawings, stating that “none of them seems 

particularly amusing, and most are not only technically crude but also virtually 

meaningless” (92). What Bridgman seems to miss, however, is that these sketches play 

with the conventions of illustrated volumes of travel writing. Indeed, the sales of Twain’s 

travelogues were particularly driven by their illustrations because they were published as 

subscription books, and the advance sales of such books depended as much on the quality 

of their binding and the quantity of their illustrations as on their content (Messent, 

                                                 
27

 Buzard contrasts such tourists with genuine travelers who, particularly when “walking 

and climbing,” know that they “travel every step of the way” (34). 



 

268 

Cambridge 47). This is made patently clear on the first edition’s title page, where billing 

for the book’s many illustrations takes the place of a subtitle: 

ILLUSTRATED BY W. FR. BROWN, TRUE WILLIAMS, B. DAY AND OTHER 

ARTISTS—WITH ALSO THREE OR FOUR PICTURES MADE BY 

THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK, WITHOUT OUTSIDE HELP; 

IN ALL 

 

THREE HUNDERED AND TWENTY-EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS. ([i]) 

Twain’s own “artistic” contributions comprise only a part of the book’s many 

illustrations, which were often copied from other sources (David 4, 7).
28

 Such 

illustrations serve a primarily financial purpose, but they still cannot escape the 

playfulness of Twain’s burlesque. They are part of his constant satirizing of the genre of 

travel literature itself. 

On another level, the “awfulness” of Twain’s artistic skill parallels his bad 

German. In describing one “study” of “Götz von Berlichingen’s horse and cab,” Twain 

includes among its “several blemishes” the flaws that “the wagon is not traveling as fast 

as the horse is” and that “there seems to be a wheel missing” (122). Further, the 

verisimilitude of the sketch is so poor that its creator must explain that one “thing flying 

out behind is not a flag, it is a curtain,” and that he is not sure whether a particular 

scribble “is a haystack or a woman” (122-23). Part of the fun of this passage is Twain’s 

usual self-deprecation, but his closing note—that “[t]his study was exhibited in the Paris 

                                                 
28

 Beverly R. David’s analysis of the images “borrowed” from Whymper’s Scrambles 

Amongst the Alps provides another example of Twain’s playful approach to the 

illustrations of A Tramp Abroad: “The most peculiar of the Whymper engravings found 

in A Tramp Abroad involves a collaboration between Whymper and Twain. Mark Twain 

took the alleged Whymper original of THE MATTERHORN, FROM NEAR THE 

SUMMIT OF THEODULE PASS and superimposed his own crude cut-out of a donkey 

over the scene” (4). 



 

269 

Salon of 1879, but did not take any medal; they do not give medals for studies” (123)—

shifts the target of satire from Twain’s own lack of artistic skill to the pretention of 

traveling artists who make equally uninspired, if somewhat more realistic, “studies.” 

Thus, Twain mocks the desire to see and experience the foreign through travel writing 

and its accompanying illustrations. Both text and illustrations leave the reader uninitiated 

into the world of the foreign and, ultimately, unmoved.  

Beyond this satire of travel literature’s conventions—and Twain’s jab at readers 

who purchase books based on the number of their illustrations rather than the quality of 

either illustrations or writing—many of these jokes about perspective and verisimilitude 

suggest a playful approach to the idea of representation in general. For example, Twain 

provides a “life-size” image of a broken dueling sword by “tracing a line around it with 

[his] pen, to show the width of the weapon” (68). Bridgman remarks of this description, 

“That being approximately what it appears to be, and no more, the source of humor 

remains obscure” (94). From a semiotic perspective, however, the sword fragment, as an 

“index,” should be a closer representation of reality than the average drawing, a more 

“literal” transcription of its subject. But, as Bridgman apparently found, this attempted 

verisimilitude fails to make the practice of dueling any more vivid. In light of Twain’s 

preoccupation with the way travel writing substitutes words for actual experience, the 

“source of humor” here appears to be a parallel failure of artistic representation. Thus, by 

parodying the artistic representations found in conventional travel writing, Twain follows 

both Cooper and Melville in lampooning the mediated view of Europe such accounts 

provide, but his version lacks the earlier authors’ accompanying arguments to seek less 



 

270 

mediated access to the foreign and to go experience the world more directly. For Twain, 

travel is all fun, with no possibility of true erudition. 

 

Continuing this play with language and representation, Twain most famously 

lampoons the process of learning a second language in one of the several appendices to A 

Tramp Abroad, “The Awful German Language.” While many praise the comedic quality 

of this sketch, and indeed it was so popular that Twain continued to deliver a version of 

the essay throughout his lecturing career, others take its critique of German more 

seriously.
29

 For Josef Raab, “Twain complains of the complexity of German in a 

wonderfully exaggerated manner in order to underline for his non-German-speaking 

American readers the alien nature of this language and the mentality behind it” (387). It is 

precisely this emphasis on the alienness of the foreign that distinguishes tourists from 

earlier cosmopolitans. Even more astutely, Sewell argues that “[t]he tacit assumption of 

the essay is that there is, or ought to be, a language that expresses thought naturally, 

logically, and independently of troublesome categories of grammar” (75).
30

 Apparently 

                                                 
29

 Ziff represents the typically positive assessments of the piece when he argues, 

“Strikingly, two of the six appendices that were added to make up the book’s required 

length are actually better reading than any section of comparable length within the 

narrative proper: ‘The Awful German Language’ is an amusing yet perspicacious account 

of the perplexities that language presents to the eager learner” (Return 206). Everett 
Emerson, who rather harshly criticizes A Tramp Abroad as a whole, writes that the sketch 

“proved that Mark Twain was still alive and conscious” (117). 

30
 Nevertheless, Sewell suggests that much of Twain’s ire is aimed, not at the German 

language in particular, but at the ridiculousness of grammar in general, which can prove 

challenging for native and non-native speakers of any language. Supporting this more 

forgiving reading of Twain’s critique, Norbert Hedderich points to moments in the essay 

when Twain praises German, usually at the expense of English or language in general. He 

notes, “At the end of the essay we find ‘The Virtues of the Language’ . . . . It is a quite 

short, but important and often overlooked section. Despite all his criticism, some aspects 



 

271 

put on the defensive by his own difficulties with linguistic difference, Twain longs for a 

language that transcends the practicalities of grammar and syntax in order to express a 

natural or universal truth. This desire is much like the attitude of Columbus and other 

imperialists, as Gabrielle M. Patty finds when she connects Twain’s sketch to the kind of 

ethnographic appeal that presents the reader with supposedly logical and empirical 

evidence to support its prejudiced opinions (435-36). Prejudice masquerading as common 

sense is always a dangerous formula, and this is exactly what “The Awful German 

Language” presents to the unwary and uncultured reader. As the following readings will 

demonstrate, Twain’s attempts at translation in this sketch and elsewhere are like his 

“innocent” portrayal of Europe: while claiming to offer an unmediated, unpretentious, 

and no-nonsense perspective, they ignore any genuine value or interest the foreign might 

hold. 

Twain begins the sketch complaining about his difficulties learning German. He 

explains, “Harris and I had been hard at work on our German during several weeks . . . , 

and although we had made good progress, it had been accomplished under great difficulty 

and annoyance, for three of our teachers had died in the meantime” (601). After 

bemoaning German’s “slip-shod and systemless” grammar, and its perplexing number of 

exceptions, Twain launches into a parody of a phrasebook example: “a certain bird” that 

is “waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain” (601-602). Already the German 

language is made ridiculous by the distance between real speech and the sample 

sentences of a textbook, which “is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of no 

                                                                                                                                                 

of German clearly fascinated him. It is the one section of the essay that is without satire” 

(32). 



 

272 

consequence to anybody” (602). In this example, Twain’s particular complaint is about 

the complex rules for determining the gender and case of “the rain,” deciding if it is 

“simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned,” “lying around, in a kind of a general 

way on the ground,” or “doing something actively” (602). Unfortunately, all of this 

analysis is for naught, as Twain eventually learns that the rain must always be in a fourth 

case. For Twain, such complex rules and exceptions, which seem to add no real meaning 

to the sentence (which was absurd from the start), illustrate the needless frustration 

caused by German’s alien grammar.
31

 As Sewell notes, the sketch “gives occasional 

evidence of a hostility that is not simply exaggerated for comic effect” (77). It betrays not 

only a genuine frustration but also a more decisive antipathy toward the language and its 

foreign constructions. 

 “The Awful German Language” also exemplifies a common thread through many 

of Twain’s linguistic farces. Twain heightens the alienness of foreign language through a 

willful misunderstanding of translation. When transferring meaning between one 

language and another, even at the most basic level, it is not enough to mechanically 

translate each word as it appears in order. The syntax must also be translated into the 

rules of the target language. By performing what he calls “a perfectly literal translation,” 

ignoring the necessary changes of syntax and rendering each word in order, Twain 

produces a ridiculously strange English translation that is supposed to convey the 

“awfulness” of the German original (603). For example, he “translates” one sentence, 

“But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrainedly-

                                                 
31

 Interestingly, Holger Kersten further connects language and tourism in his argument 

that, “In the same way other tourists collect bric-a-brac, Twain seems to have intently 

collected the curiosities of the German language” (202). 



 

273 

after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counsellor’s wife met” (603-604). 

Twain presents this series of parenthetical phrases and interminable compounds as 

empirical evidence of German’s cumbersome construction. But the evidence is unfair. It 

replicates for the English-speaking reader the experience not of German as read by a 

fluent speaker, but of German frozen in a state of early language acquisition, when 

everything seems inherently foreign and strange. Twain creates a similarly jarring effect 

by translating the gender of German pronouns literally, referring to a “Fishwife” as “it,” 

“One of the Fishes” as “he,” and a “Scale” as “she” (608-609). In the resulting “Tale of 

the Fishwife and Its Sad Fate,” Twain’s unconventionally “literal” translation of German 

grammar is inherently confusing because English and German gender their antecedents 

differently (608-609). By presenting a mix of English vocabulary and German grammar 

that belongs to neither language, Twain uses the pretense of “literal translation” to ossify 

the strangeness of a new system of grammar, implying that the grammar of German is 

inherently “awful” when its rules are merely different. The effect of this distorted version 

of “literal” translation is similar to Twain’s tracing of the dueling sword. Twain seems to 

present the most accurate version of German possible, but by too closely “tracing” the 

original, he replicates the shape but loses the true experience of German for a German 

speaker. 

A similar treatment of translation can be found in another linguistic burlesque that 

Twain wrote during the period, “The ‘Jumping Frog.’ In English. Then in French. Then 

Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil” 

(1875). As the lengthy title suggests, the piece consists of three versions of Twain’s 

famous story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”: the original, a 



 

274 

translation into French, and Twain’s own “translation” of that French version back into 

English. The target of Twain’s satire is a review of his works in the French periodical 

Revue des Deux Mondes, which was accompanied by a French translation of “Jumping 

Frog,” both composed by Marie-Thérèse Blanc under the penname “Th. Bentzon” 

(Wilson 538).
32

 In the brief explanation that introduces his collection of “Jumping Frog” 

versions, Twain bristles that, although “Jumping Frog is a funny story, [Bentzon] can’t 

see why it should ever really convulse anyone with laughter” (29). Twain is indignant 

that the translated tale offered as proof of this lukewarm praise is “not translated . . . at 

all,” but that Bentzon “has simply mixed it all up” (29). Following these complaints, 

Twain offers the reader a reprinting of the French version as “proof” of his grievance. He 

further explains, so “that even the unlettered may know my injury and give me their 

compassion, I have been at infinite pains and trouble to re-translate this French version 

back into English” (29). Although Twain admits that his spoken French is poor, and that 

the retranslation required great effort, he also claims he “can translate very well” and 

implicitly suggests that his back-translation will be a more accurate representation of the 

French version than the French version was of the original (29). While Twain’s scathing 

reaction to Bentzon’s translation may be attributed to his general dislike of the French 

(see Scott 115, 249), or to the inherent difficulty of translating either humor or dialect 

literature (see Halliday 84), several have also read it as a critique of translation more 

                                                 
32

 In his response, Twain assumes Bentzon is male. Mark K. Wilson and Marc Shell 

(“Prized”) both provide interesting analyses of Bentzon’s review and her general views of 

international literature.  



 

275 

generally.
33

 In any case, the piece offers little hope of worthwhile or effective cross-

cultural communication. 

Whatever his motive, Twain uses the same deliberate misunderstanding of what 

translation entails that is found in “The Awful German Language” to demonstrate to his 

“unlettered” readers that Bentzon’s French translation is a failure. As Sewell explains: 

Twain’s retranslation is not “fair” because he does not limit himself to 

parodying the formal diction and grammar of Bentzon’s translation. 

Instead, he mocks the French language itself, . . . confusing tenses and 

pronoun genders and cognates . . . and perversely translating idioms word 

for word so as to make nonsense of them. (69-70) 

Like any translator, Bentzon made a series of difficult choices in rendering Twain’s 

American idiom into French. But Twain’s critique is not limited to the shortcomings of 

such artistic choices. Instead, he retranslates French idioms, which sound natural and 

make perfect sense in French, in an overly literal way. In the first version of the tale, for 

example, Simon Wheeler begins: “well, there was a feller here once by the name of Jim 

                                                 
33

 Sewell suggests that “[t]he most important general implication of the sketch is that 

Simon Wheeler—and therefore Mark Twain—cannot exist in French, because direct 

discourse can never be preserved in translation” (69). Accordingly, the piece not only 

joins “The Awful German Language” in lampooning the oddities of foreign expression, 

but it also indicates a deeper distrust in the potential of translation to bridge the language 

gap, casting doubt on the possibility of any cross-cultural understanding. Similarly, Shell 

argues, “Twain hints that good translation—an accurate ‘exchange’—is an impossibility” 

(“Prized” 511). Sewell also argues that Twain’s play with the French translation and 

English “retranslation” continue and complicate the “problematic of framing, translation, 

and quotation that figures in” the original tale (68). Supporting such a view, James E. 

Caron reads the original story as a play with narration: “Simon Wheeler’s garrulity 

produces the marvelously humorous and exquisitely absurd spectacle of a man drifting 

serenely through his ‘queer yarn without ever smiling’” (255). In addition, Twain 

continues this play with various versions in “Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ 

Story” by comparing his own tale to an ancient Greek story eerily similar in all 

particulars. He explains the similarity by concluding, “I think it must be the case of 

history actually repeating itself, and not a case of a good story floating down the ages and 

surviving” (447-48).  



 

276 

Smiley, in the winter of ’49—or may be it was the spring of ’50—I don’t recollect 

exactly” (30). Bentzon’s version begins: “—Il y avait une fois ici un individu connu sous 

le nom de Jim Smiley: c’était dans l’hiver de 49, peut-être bien au printemps de 50, je ne 

me rappelle pas exactement” (35). As in any translation, there are choices here worth 

discussing, such as “individu” for “feller,” but Twain’s retranslation does not focus on 

such disputable preferences. Instead, he back-translates the French in a ludicrously literal 

fashion: “It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim Smiley; 

it was in the winter of ’49, possibly well at the spring of ’50, I no me recollect not 

exactly” (39). Rather than making even the most basic grammatical changes in order to 

follow the rules of the target language, Twain translates the idiomatic construction “Il y 

avait,” the preposition “sous,” and the reflexive verb “me rappelle” word for word, 

rendering them awkward and nearly nonsensical in English. His “clawed back” 

translation is full of such examples. 

When examined from the perspective of what translation actually entails, Twain’s 

comic rendering of the French “Jumping Frog” is too exaggeratedly terrible to be taken as 

any kind of serious evidence of Bentzon’s failure. Portraying Twain’s ridiculous 

translation in the most complimentary light, Sewell argues that, “by making us stumble 

over the manifold awkwardnesses in an overliteral French-to-English translation, Twain 

forces us to ask whether authentic translation is ever possible” (70). Supporting this 

argument for Twain’s critical intentions, several moments in A Tramp Abroad 

demonstrate deeper understanding of what real translation requires, Twain’s fairly 



 

277 

successful translation of “The Lorelei” not least among them (146).
34

 Such examples 

indicate that Twain’s strategic use of poor translation in “The Awful German Language” 

and “The Jumping Frog . . .” must be somewhat tongue in cheek. Still, the extent of 

Twain’s vitriol makes it too easy to laugh at Bentzon. The spurious empiricism of 

offering these parallel versions as “proof” of her failure—the same empiricism found in 

“The Awful German Language”—can trick the reader into believing that Twain’s 

translation accurately portrays the French version. Indeed, the case of Harriet Beecher 

Stowe demonstrates that growing numbers of Americans both at home and abroad were 

becoming more linguistically isolated and, as a consequence, less likely to think seriously 

about what translation actually entails. As Lawrence Venuti demonstrates, translators 

have a history of “invisibility” that has made both readers and scholars alike 

underappreciate and misunderstand the complex nature of translation and the difficult 

choices any translator must face (12-13). In light of this widespread ignorance, it seems 

likely that many of Twain’s readers would not have understood the violence his overly 

literal translation was doing to the French version, and hence may not have recognized 

the unfairness of his supposedly empirical evidence. Missing the potential nuances of 

                                                 
34

 Another notable translation of Twain’s is the German children’s book Der 

Struwwelpeter, which Twain translated as “Slovenly Peter.” As Everett Emerson 

describes, “In the fall [of 1891] the Clemenses settled in Berlin, where the writer devoted 

three days and nights to the translation of Der Struwwelpeter, which he called ‘the most 

celebrated child’s book in Europe,’” and which, despite the author’s apparent intentions, 

was not published until 1935 (188). While recognizing the various flaws and liberties of 

Twain’s translation, Susanna Ashton and Amy Jean Petersen call it “a work of energy 

and wit that may have better reflected the tenor of the original Hoffmann poems than did 

many of the more widely published translations” (36). Stahl’s article “Mark Twain’s 

‘Slovenly Peter’ in the Context of Twain and German Culture” also provides an 

interesting reading of Twain’s translation, which, Stahl argues, “is more indebted to the 

American experiences of the frontier than to the German ‘Kultur der Zurückhaltung’ or 

‘culture of restraint’” (211). 



 

278 

Twain’s play with translation, it seems likely that many would have merely laughed at 

the absurdity of the French language. 

Moreover, even when Twain is most critical of translation as an artificial 

mediation akin to pretentious travel accounts, he differs from his predecessors in offering 

no alternative model of cross-cultural understanding. For Twain, translation is imperfect 

not because some untranslated words convey meaning better—Cooper’s cosmopolitan 

perspective—but because foreign sentiments often cannot be understood, or are not even 

worth understanding. Although Twain critiques the imperfect mediation of translation 

just as he critiques the superficiality of guides and guidebooks, he fails to offer any hope 

of real cross-cultural understanding. His only solution to mediation and 

miscommunication is a no-nonsense disregard for European culture. Twain’s treatment of 

translation thus exemplifies the frequent disparity between the most critical reading of his 

satire and the more prejudiced or nationalist readings it often invites. As the following 

examination of the author’s later career reveals, this gap widened over time. Despite the 

attitudes toward cultural difference presented in his works, Samuel Clemens continued in 

his desire to learn European language. As Cooper might have predicted, this continued 

study, as well as his extensive time abroad, broadened Clemens’s personal views of the 

foreign, although it did not quite change his public persona. 

The Growing Cosmopolitanism of Samuel Clemens 

This project has illustrated a gradual change in American attitudes toward other 

parts of the world as reflected in American travel and travel writing. But just as countries 

change, so, of course, do individual people, if on a shorter timeline. Thus, the Mark 

Twain of 1867 epitomizes the rise of tourism, but the man at century’s end, modified by 



 

279 

age and experience, does not so perfectly mirror the collective attitude of his nation. This 

natural, personal change is complicated, however, by the complex relationship between 

Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens. Both Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad uphold a 

nationalistic ideal of linguistic and cultural superiority that is exemplified by the persona 

of Mark Twain, but this provincialism does not necessarily correspond to the attitudes of 

Samuel Clemens, who demonstrates a growing cosmopolitanism toward the end of his 

life. Thus, the divide between Twain’s “innocent” persona and the increasingly 

international outlook of his creator widens throughout Twain’s later career. 

Clemens adopted the pseudonym “Mark Twain” in his early years as a newspaper 

reporter when, according to James E. Caron, he began using the name to signal pieces 

containing “comic disruptions of journalistic norms” (137). During his 1866 visit to 

Hawaii as a travel correspondent for the newspaper Alta California, Clemens signed 

Mark Twain to his published letters, adapting the persona to the genre of burlesque travel 

narrative, but he used his given name while traveling around the islands (Rogers 38-39; 

Frear 18). During the Quaker City cruise, however, things became less clear as, in an oft-

cited example, Clemens began to occasionally sign letters (including one to his mother) 

“Mark” (Ganzel 69; Caron 389).
35

 These facts have led to widespread disagreement over 

what to call the author of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. While some critics advocate the 

one extreme of treating “Mark Twain” as a purely fictional character (see Robinson, 

“Mark” 16), others agree with Ziff in asserting, that for all intents and purposes, “by the 

close of the century the Sam Clemens who in 1863 had created Mark Twain had turned 

                                                 
35

 As Caron points out, “Signing a letter or an inscription to one’s mother with a 

pseudonym obviously indicates a complex sense of identity” (389). 



 

280 

into him” (Mark 9).
36

 As Caron argues, however, the relation between Mark Twain and 

Samuel Clemens is more complicated than this, and “‘Mark Twain’ therefore does not 

just indicate a pseudonym, but neither does it exactly signify a comic character wholly 

separate from its author” (12).
37

 Mark Twain was a complex persona that Clemens could 

and did embody, but the figure of Mark Twain does not fully encompass or represent all 

of the thoughts and opinions that the man could have held. The disparity between the 

views of foreign language expressed in Twain’s published works and the real experiences 

of Samuel Clemens is only one of many areas that highlight this complex relationship.  

Even though the distinction is never clear-cut, the divide between Twain and 

Clemens is quite useful in clarifying his changing views of American identity and 

nationalism. While Clemens’s cosmopolitanism grew, and a degree of his worldly 

experience inevitably bled through into the writings he signed Mark Twain, the views 

openly professed by his authorial persona more frequently belong to the common tourist 

                                                 
36

 Baetzhold, however, cautions against eliding the two figures: “Many studies run 

aground because they take at face value some of the views expressed in ostensibly 

autobiographical works like The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It. . . . [I]t is important 

to separate the man Samuel Clemens from the many ‘poses’ of the writer Mark Twain” 

(xii). James M. Cox presents an opposing view: “For Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain 

became the means of realizing himself. The pseudonym neither concealed, obliterated, 

nor narrowed his identity, but exposed and freed it” (20). 

37
 With further relevance to the issues of mass tourism, Ann M. Ryan reads the figure of 

“Mark Twain” as a model of modernity: “For if the celebrity persona of ‘Mark Twain’ 

represents one of the important byproducts of urbanity—he is in many ways an artificial 

person, an amalgam of imagination, industry, and technology—Samuel Clemens, the 

author of that mask, narrates the impoverished truths that frequently make this artifice 

such a powerful commodity. Twain anticipates American modernism: the intractability of 

race and nation, the tyrannies of industrialism and religion, and the promise, as well as 

the illusion, of a transnational, transhistorical, transcendent individuality. His narrative 

insights also resonate uncannily with the literary and political theories of a postmodern 

and postcolonial world” (2). 



 

281 

he once epitomized than to the international traveler he had become. Thus, Twain 

becomes useful for demonstrating one final change in American travel at the turn of the 

twentieth century. Previously, in an age in which only the comparatively wealthy and 

cultured could travel, Cooper could adequately represent the majority of Americans 

abroad. With the growing accessibility of international travel, however, the attitudes of 

American travelers in Europe began to correspond to the concurrent division of high-

brow and low-brow literature. While Clemens, the traveling, and well-traveled, dignitary 

began to mirror the expatriate literati epitomized by Cooper—and later, but with 

important differences, by James—Clemens’s authorial persona, Mark Twain, continued 

to emulate the low-brow and classless “ugly American.” 

Despite its overwhelmingly touristic leanings, A Tramp Abroad reveals the 

beginnings of Clemens’s increasingly cosmopolitan outlook. For example, while 

commenting on the broad appeal of “low-grade music” in comparison to music of the 

more elevated sort, “which requires a higher faculty, a faculty which must be assisted and 

developed by teaching” (102), Twain shifts to a parallel discussion of the inaccessibility 

of high-brow works of art. He then writes of painter Joseph. M. W. Turner: 

A Boston newspaper reporter went and took a look at the Slave Ship 

floundering about in that fierce conflagration of reds and yellows, and said 

it reminded him of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. 

In my then uneducated state, that went home to my non-cultivation, and I 

thought here is a man with an unobstructed eye. [sic] Mr. Ruskin would 

have said: This person is an ass. That is what I would say, now. (102) 

The Boston reporter’s comic image exemplifies the irreverent humor of Mark Twain as it 

would have been presented without blush or retraction in Innocents Abroad. But here, 

Twain calls this no-nonsense view the opinion of an uncultured ass. It is a rare glimpse of 

how Twain’s provincialism becomes moderated by Clemens’s own growing 



 

282 

cosmopolitanism. Despite its offhand inclusion, this admission of an increased 

appreciation of fine art, a target of repeated derision in Innocents Abroad, suggests that 

Clemens has been influenced by the culture of Europe.  

This same open-mindedness is evidenced by Clemens’s ongoing study of the 

German language, despite the criticisms Twain expresses so strongly in print. The 

Clemens family prepared for their 1878 trip to Europe by studying foreign language, and 

Clemens continued his study of German for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, some critics 

show reserve in assessing Clemens’s proficiency. According to Richard H. Cracroft, 

“Twain was, in fact, bedeviled by the German language, and his journals and notebooks 

reveal increasing frustration and complaints about the ‘perplexing’ tongue” (12).
38

 Still, 

as Carl Dolmetsch chronicles in great detail in his study of Clemens’s extended residence 

in Vienna, Samuel Clemens’s respectable German allowed him to cut a far more 

cosmopolitan figure than Mark Twain would allow readers to believe possible. 

The Samuel Clemens who traveled on the Quaker City was to a large extent, like 

Mark Twain, an American innocent, but as the author spent more and more time abroad, 

                                                 
38

 John B. Hoben argues that the humor of Twain’s critiques of German was “all the 

richer because it flowed from one who, in spite of his self-depreciation, was fond of it 

and sufficiently skilled to lecture in it and translate it with audacity, if not proficiency” 

(164). Further, Scott describes how “Mark Twain’s interest in the German language 

continued to show itself both in his notebooks and in his private correspondence,” in 

which the author “lapsed into German[,] . . . copied lines of German poetry[,] and made 

lists of German words and expressions” (132). Raab also comments on Clemens’s 

interest in German: “Mark Twain was very familiar with Germany; he spoke German 

fairly well, and he assessed Germany in a number of his writings” (381). In contrast, 

Ursula Thomas demonstrates how the “uncritical judgment of Mark Twain’s prowess in 

learning languages” encouraged by his private notebooks “is offset by his daughter 

Clara’s much later assessment” that her father could sometimes speak German, but 

“‘other times he would make no attempt to speak anything but English, and if Viennese 

ladies and gentlemen who called were unable to speak anything but German, great 

misunderstandings took place as to what the topic of conversation really was’” (135-36). 



 

283 

it would have become impossible to maintain the same level of naive provincialism.
39

 

Everett Emerson describes how, in June 1891, Clemens began a decade of “obligatory 

mobility,” primarily for his wife’s health, but also because of the decreased expense of 

living abroad: 

During these years Clemens visited America frequently on business; in 

1893-94, one stay lasted nine months. But his residence was in Europe, in 

Aix-les-Bains, Marienbad, Berlin, Bad Nauheim, Florence, Munich, Paris, 

London, Lucerne, Vienna, and elsewhere, with a full year occupied with a 

round-the-world lecture tour. The retreat was symbolic of his state of 

mind. He was an American writer who had virtually lost his once 

inimitable voice and was groping now even for his identity. (185) 

Messent calls Twain, “virtually an expatriate” during this period (Cambridge 7), and such 

expatriation had unavoidable consequences for his world outlook.
40

 If an appreciation for 

foreign language is one important mark of cosmopolitanism, as the past chapters have 

demonstrated, then these worldly views would appear to be in direct contrast to the 

narrowly provincial attitudes expressed in “The Awful German Language” or “The 

‘Jumping Frog’ . . . Clawed Back.” While the Mark Twain persona continued to support a 

position of linguistic nationalism, Samuel Clemens became increasingly cosmopolitan in 

his recognition of the validity, but also of the inherent incommensurability, of different 

                                                 
39

 Scott makes a similar argument: “From its inception A Tramp Abroad had no chance of 

approximating the bubbling spontaneity of its predecessor. Gone from Mark Twain’s 

nature was the untutored Americanism, half-amused but bristling, of 1867. Twelve years 

of associating almost exclusively with people of culture in the East and abroad had cost 

him much of the charming innocence which had animated his first travel book. The 

chasm between Mark Twain and the Old World was contracting. On this latest excursion, 

for example, he even brought home foreign furnishings and bric-a-brac worth well over 

five thousand dollars” (121). 

40
 As Scott argues, “He had not become global in his fame without becoming global in 

his thinking as well” (vii). Carl Dolmetsch (6), Janice McIntire-Strasburg (232), Peter 

Messent (“Not” 202), and Ann M. Ryan (2) all support these arguments, calling Twain a 

cosmopolitan and a transnational figure. 



 

284 

languages and cultures—although he never matched Cooper or Melville in his ability to 

reach a golden mean of cross-cultural understanding between assimilation and 

incomprehensibility. 

 

Twain’s growing ambivalence toward foreign language and culture becomes 

evident in his last major piece of travel writing, Following the Equator (1897), in which 

he on one hand continues many of the linguistic jokes of Innocents and A Tramp Abroad, 

but on the other hand treats the issues of colonialism and imperialism with far greater 

seriousness. In 1895, Clemens, accompanied by his wife and one of his three daughters, 

began a lecture tour around the world in order to repay his extensive debts (R. Cooper 

1).
41

 After lecturing east to west across the United States, Twain visited Australasia, 

India, and South Africa, making numerous other stops along the way. After returning to 

London, the family was to be joined by Clemens’s two other daughters, but one died 

before they could be reunited (R. Cooper 314). As Scott describes, Clemens had 

difficulty “mask[ing] the despair in his soul” after this family tragedy (224), and it may 

have contributed to the increased seriousness and pessimism most critics find in 

Following the Equator.
42

 Because Twain was living in England at the time of its 

                                                 
41

 Robert Cooper’s Around the World with Mark Twain provides a fascinating look at this 

trip as well as an account of Cooper’s own experiences recreating it one hundred years 

later. 

42
 Bridgman writes that “signs of unmitigated and even invented pessimism [permeate] 

the book” (128). Daniel J. Philippon argues, even more critically, “Taken as a whole, 

Following the Equator is not Twain at his best. He is often dull and uninspired; too 

frequently he relies on his notes, sometimes inserting them with little or no alteration into 

the text; and, when excessive, his quotation from the works of other writers can become 

tiresome” (6). Others connect the book’s seriousness to Twain’s critique of imperialism. 

For example, Robinson asserts, “Its humorous interludes notwithstanding, the book is 



 

285 

composition and publishing, it is not very surprising that many scholars have chosen the 

British edition of the work, entitled More Tramps Abroad, as the text better 

representative of the author’s intention. Not only does it contain fewer deletions than the 

American version, but it was set from Twain’s manuscript, and he read the proofs (E. 

Emerson 226; Shillingsburg xi). In the following reading, I will use the British edition of 

More Tramps Abroad and refer to it by that name. 

The British title indicates continuity with Twain’s previous foreign travelogues, 

and indeed, More Tramps Abroad does reiterate many of the linguistic jokes of its 

predecessors. For example, the section about India is full of criticism for the faulty 

English of Twain’s servants and guides. Describing one, Twain writes, “Where he gets 

his English is his own secret. There is nothing like it elsewhere in the earth; or even in 

paradise perhaps, but the other place is probably full of it” (245). Criticizing the poor 

English of foreigners is, of course, a typical offense of the “ugly American.” More 

interestingly, Twain intensifies his previous mockery of cross-cultural exchange to 

outright linguistic snobbery when he reverses an old joke. This time, when his servant 

begins to speak incomprehensibly, Twain says, “I can’t understand Hindostani,” only to 

get the reply, “Not Hindostani, master—English” (248). This time, it is not his own, but 

the foreigner’s (or more properly, the local’s) language that is deficient to the point of 

unrecognizability. Also continuing a previous running gag, Twain renames his Indian 

guides, not as “Ferguson” but, even more problematically, as “Satan.” One reason, he 

explains, is that Indian names are so long. And once again, the traveling American cannot 

                                                                                                                                                 

first and foremost a troubled, often angry report on the misery wrought by Western 

imperialism along the equatorial black belt” (“Innocent” 43). 



 

286 

be bothered to learn the alien appellations of foreigners.
43

 In More Tramps Abroad, as in 

his earlier works and the lectures about language he continued to deliver throughout the 

trip, linguistic difference is merely something to laugh at.
44

  

As the foregoing examples suggest, Twain is most critical of language in the 

section about India. He mocks both the unwieldy native languages and the Indians’ use of 

English. When Twain describes a letter from a “Hindoo youth,” he most clearly reveals 

his ideal of what foreign English should be like: “The handwriting was excellent, and the 

wording was English—English, and yet not exactly English. The style was easy and 

smooth and flowing, yet there was something subtly foreign about it—something 

tropically ornate and sentimental and rhetorical” (412). There are two salient aspects to 

this youth’s use of English, and Twain seems enamored with both of them. On the one 

hand, both the neat penmanship and general clarity of the piece show a fastidious concern 

for preserving the integrity of the English language, and they minimize any difficulties 

that Twain may have in understanding the message. These virtues prevent two of Twain’s 

most frequent criticisms: incomprehensibility and the massacre of English grammar. On 

the other hand, once any barriers to understanding are removed, Twain appreciates the 

                                                 
43

 He jokes of another man, for example, “We named him Barney for short; we couldn’t 

use his real name, there wasn’t time” (278). After yet another rant on the subject, Twain 

connects this criticism to his previous jabs at foreign language. He says of a name with 

“fifty eight letters in it”: “This removes the long German words from competition; they 

are permanently out of the race” (351). Illustrating the break between such Twainian 

jokes and Clemens’s personal views, however, it is interesting to note that the author’s 

journals of the trip refer to one servant only as “Mousa” or “Mouza,” never “Satan” (R. 

Cooper 200). 

44
 Robert Cooper gives one example of Twain’s continued delivery of “The Awful 

German Language” (52). Miriam Jones Shillingsburg also provides extensive 

descriptions of the content of Twain’s lectures in Australia. Her index contains an 

extensive entry for the subheading “German Language” under “Stories” (239). 



 

287 

“tropically ornate” foreignness of the man’s English. His assessment reveals not only a 

latent preference for picturesque primitivism, but also the suggestion that it would not be 

fitting for an Indian man to speak or write English as if he were a white American or 

Englishman. Although Twain values the ease of communication made possible by the 

Indian’s clear English writing, he suggests that evidence of the writer’s foreignness is 

desirable or even necessary to mark him as manifestly “other.” Once again, linguistic 

difference is valued not for broadening provincial perspectives but for its ability to 

demarcate national boundaries. 

 

Despite its treatment of cross-cultural communication in India, More Tramps 

Abroad does depart from the thorough provincialism of Twain’s previous works. In sharp 

contrast to earlier travel writings, even Twain’s narrative persona tours the world not as a 

callow tourist but as the famous author and lecturer. Indeed, the work begins by 

highlighting this new, cosmopolitan status. Twain writes, “The starting-point of this 

lecturing trip around the world was Paris, where we had been living a year or two” (1). 

The trip begins with a cross-country lecture tour in the United States, but the Clemens 

family must first “[sail] for America” (1). Although the details of Clemens’s expatriate 

status are not elaborated in the narrative, this opening reveals that he is no longer the 

typical American citizen and resident. He is no longer an American “innocent.” 

The most significant sign of Twain’s worldlier outlook is his critique of 

imperialism. In the years after the publication of More Tramps Abroad, Twain would 

become active in the American Anti-imperialist league, declaring his membership in 



 

288 

1900 (Zwick 3).
45

 While traveling in 1895, however, Twain already expresses great 

sympathy for native populations. As Ziff argues, the “pages dealing with the dignity of 

native peoples and the despicable mendacity of their colonial exploiters foreshadow the 

social critic who was to become increasingly vehement in his attacks on imperialism” 

(Mark 54). Nevertheless, while it is necessary to recognize Twain’s obvious distaste for 

the injustices of imperialism, one cannot do so without also acknowledging his more 

subtly racist attitudes.
46

 

Still, More Tramps Abroad contains many passages expressing Twain’s clear 

disapproval of colonial and imperial practices. For instance, he exposes the trickery and 

injustice of “French and English recruiting crews” who practically snatch Pacific natives 

from their homes to be transported to Australia (45). He concludes, “Thus exile to 

Queenslande—with the opportunity to acquire civilization, an umbrella, and a pretty poor 

                                                 
45

 Both Jim Zwick and Amy Kaplan offer extensive analysis of Twain’s avowed anti-

imperialism. Kaplan connects his views to the experience gained from a life of traveling: 

“In his anti-imperialist writing from his last dark decade, Twain brought lessons to bear 

from his earliest writing and worldwide travels. As a writer, the power—and limits—of 

his critique can be found less in a summary of his political ideas than in the way he 

wielded language as a weapon against injustice” (“Conquest” 69). Further, John Carlos 

Rowe argues, “The scholarly identification of Twain’s ideological limitations, at least by 

today’s standards, should in no way trivialize the great achievement of his critique of 

European and emerging U.S. imperialisms” (Literary 139). 

46
 Yothers suggests that “Mark Twain uses exoticism both to condemn racism and 

reinforce certain strands of racialism” (“Facing” 115). Hellwig seems to highlight this 

ambivalence unintentionally: “This is a common theme in Following the Equator, that 

the civilized, European, and white ethnicities have become anti–Christian and barbaric in 

their dealings with the native populations of the countries that they rape and pillage. The 

white has become a savage, more savage than the traditional ‘savages’ of the world, 

supposedly uncivilized and uneducated, and justifiably ruled by the superior white 

savage” (129). While this reading makes Twain’s obvious criticism of colonial practices 

clear, it also reveals that he does little to think beyond the received dichotomy of 

civilization and savagery. 



 

289 

quality of profanity—is twelve times as deadly for [the Kanaka] as war. Common 

Christian charity, common humanity, does seem to require, not only that these people be 

returned to their homes, but that war, pestilence, and famine be introduced among them 

for their preservation” (50). With typically facetious humor, Twain decries the supposed 

“benefits” of civilization that such “recruits” would acquire, and the near inevitable death 

and misfortune to which this abduction will subject them. Twain expands upon this 

critique by ironically praising a mass-poisoning of Australian aborigines in contrast to the 

more common and less criticized injustices of other colonizers. He lists a series of less 

human offenses including (most relevantly for the United States): “In many countries we 

have taken the savage’s land from him, and made him our slave, and lashed him every 

day, and broken his pride, and made death his only friend, and overworked him till he 

dropped in his tracks; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it, yet 

a quick death by poison is loving-kindness to it” (137). Compared to such lengthy torture, 

Twain suggests that genocide by poison may be a mercy. Despite Howard G. Baetzhold’s 

perceptive observation that Twain “almost invariably . . . directed his criticisms not at 

Britain but at human nature generally” (182), such examples show an increasing degree 

of sympathy toward foreign peoples. 

Twain is somewhat more subtle when critiquing the “benefits” white civilization 

has conferred upon Hawaii. Even though his scheduled lecture there had to be canceled 

because of a cholera outbreak, Twain takes the occasion of sailing by the islands to 

reflect on his 1866 trip. In his early letters to the Alta California, as Amy Kaplan 

contends, Twain “satirized the missionaries’ effort to ‘civilize’ the natives, yet he also 

saw Hawaiians through the gaze of the colonizer as childlike, primitive, and inferior” 



 

290 

(“Conquest” 69).
47

 In his final travelogue, however, Twain is more critical of the white 

occupation of Hawaii, as when he describes the precipitous drop in “native population” 

since the first white contact. He concludes: “All intelligent people praise Kamehameha I. 

and Liholiho for conferring upon their people the great boon of civilization. I would do it 

myself, but my intelligence is out of repair now from overwork” (23). While popular 

opinion insists that the occupation and annexation of Hawaii have benefited the once-

savage society, Twain cannot reconcile such received wisdom with the near destruction 

of the native population. 

One of the most interesting points about Hawaii, and one which reoccurs in 

Twain’s writings, is the figure of the translator Ragsdale. In his 1866 letters, Twain 

describes Ragsdale with a combination of respect and anxiety. He first introduces him as 

“Bill Ragsdale, a ‘half white’ (half white and half Kanaka), who translated [an official 

document] and clattered it off in Kanaka with a volubility that was calculated to make a 

slow-spoken man like me distressingly nervous” (Letters 110). But it is not only the 

speed of the foreign language that makes Twain uneasy. Despite praising Ragsdale for his 

ability to translate in both directions, his “turning every Kanaka speech into English and 

every English speech into Kanaka, with a readiness and felicity of language that are 

remarkable,” Twain admits that there is “a spice of deviltry in the fellow’s nature” that 

will drive him to “drop in a little voluntary contribution occasionally in the way of a word 

or two that will make the gravest speech utterly ridiculous” (111). Twain obviously 

                                                 
47

 Christopher McBride even further connects Twain with America’s expansionist 

practices by explaining that, by “[a]rguing for commercial expansion into the Pacific, he 

discovered a colonial stance upon which most of his audience could agree” (Colonizer 

65). 



 

291 

admires this “rascal” for doing just what Twain himself does when playing with the act of 

translation, twisting the transference of meaning to create humor. At the same time, 

Twain does not seem entirely comfortable with the power this man of mixed race gains 

from the position of translator.
48

  

Still, Ragsdale continued to be a powerful figure in the mind of Twain, who even 

planned to write a novel about him.
49

 Following this continued fascination, Twain’s 

description of Ragsdale in More Tramps Abroad is less ambivalent in its praise. Twain 

calls him “a brilliant young fellow” who “[a]s an interpreter . . . would have been hard to 

match anywhere” (30). In contrast to his earlier emphasis on Ragsdale’s deceitful streak, 

Twain describes how, after discovering an early sign of leprosy that he easily could have 

concealed from his fiancée, Ragsdale “would not be treacherous to the girl that loved 

him” and “would not marry her to a doom like his” (30). The figure of Ragsdale adds yet 

another wrinkle to Twain’s complex relationship with translation. Although, in Twain’s 

youth, the “half-caste” man may have symbolized both the power of the translator and the 

danger of such cultural mixing, Twain’s continued interest in him reveals a deeper 

appreciation of translation than can be found in the majority of the author’s public works. 

                                                 
48

 Kaplan, too, connects Ragsdale’s translation to Twain’s own satire: “Twain is intrigued 

by Ragsdale’s facility at translation from Kanaka to English. Part of this fluency gives 

him the power of a trickster or parodist, like Twain himself” (“Imperial” 246; also see 

Anarchy 87). McBride takes a more critical position when he argues that Twain is “intent 

on disparaging this man who possesses more foreign language skill than he does” 

(Colonizer 75). 

49
 Baetzhold speculates that the planned novel “would have presented a contrast between 

the old and new civilizations in the islands, with the proponents of the old superstitions 

resisting the efforts of the Christian missionaries” (98-99). 



 

292 

Ragsdale’s positive portrayal in More Tramps Abroad marks Clemens’s increasingly 

inclusive and cosmopolitan outlook. 

Both the growth and the limits of Twain’s cosmopolitanism are perhaps best 

illustrated by one of the larger sections of More Tramps Abroad, Twain’s account of his 

visit to Australia. Twain departs from his previous narrow-minded nationalism in his 

frank regard for Australian culture. For example, Twain demonstrates a relish for 

Australian language. He admires some examples of slang, calling them “expressive 

ones,” and describing his first time hearing “the immortal ‘My word!’” as “positively 

thrilling” (147). Likewise, instead of disparaging “the curious names of Australasian 

towns” as he had done with German words and Indian names, Twain appears to get great 

enjoyment from their strangeness. As Miriam Jones Shillingsburg recounts, one running 

joke of Twain’s Australian lectures was his attempt to put the names of both animals and 

towns into doggerel verse (45-46). The fruit of these labors as it appears in More Tramps 

Abroad is a forty-eight-line poem in rhymed quatrains that uses sixty-six of the eighty-

one “curious names” Twain lists (226-27). Here is one stanza: 

The Murriwillumbo complaineth in song 

    For the garlanded bowers of Woolloomooloo, 

And the Ballarat Fly and the lone Wollongong 

    They dream of the gardens of Jamberoo; (227) 

The poem is undeniably silly, but it also betrays an enjoyment of linguistic difference 

untainted by harsh mockery or satire. Yet, despite this clear broadening of horizons, 

Twain’s affinity for Australia may derive from the country’s resemblance to the United 

States. Shillingsburg describes the virtues Twain found that Australians and Americans 

had in common, including “fast lifts and tall buildings” as well as a nature that was 

“unself-conscious, frank, open, unreserved, independent, and not exclusive” (76). Twain 



 

293 

can thus admire Australia’s particularities while still emphasizing the underlying beliefs 

and priorities of American culture. Moreover, the linguistic difference of Australia, like 

English in India, is of the most comforting kind for Twain: it is readily comprehensible, 

but not without markers of a distinct national community.  

Despite Twain’s undeniably expanded horizons, the ambivalent depiction of 

cultural difference in More Tramps Abroad also betrays a belief in the inevitable 

dominance of the English language. In a discussion of the various names of 

constellations, Twain concludes, “In a little while now—I cannot tell exactly how long it 

will be—the globe will belong to the English-speaking race, and, of course, the skies 

also. Then the constellations will be reorganized and polished up, and renamed” (43). 

Most obviously, this ominous pronouncement could be classed with Twain’s other 

critiques of the British Empire. But if disapproving of Britain’s growing influence, Twain 

does not suggest that anything could be done to stop it. Whether this dominance would be 

benevolent or not, Twain predicts (more or less accurately) that all the world’s peoples 

will eventually need to speak English.
50 

The nuances of Twain’s prediction are further 

suggested in the entry from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar that introduces the 

book’s conclusion: “I have travelled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even 

the angels speak English with an accent” (484). On one hand, this motto suggests that 

Twain’s extensive travels have taught him that there is no “standard” or ideal form of a 

language, and linguistic difference is a fact of human existence, not a mark of 

                                                 
50

 John Carlos Rowe also finds that, “[d]espite frequently expressed sympathies with 

native peoples throughout his travels on his global lecturing tour, Twain also appears to 

acknowledge the inevitability of Euro-American hegemony over the modern world” 

(Literary 122). 



 

294 

blameworthy otherness.
 
In this way, the motto contrasts with the typically provincial and 

linguistically isolated outlook that imagines one’s own speech is accent-less, just as only 

“foreigners” may seem to have an “ethnicity.”
51

 At the same time, the maxim suggests 

that the reach of Anglophone culture extends even as far as heaven. But in lieu of a 

homogeneous monolingual community of cosmopolitan brotherhood, national differences 

are still clearly marked by accents, just like the ideal foreign English of the “Hindoo 

youth.” Indeed, Twain’s presentation of Anglophone imperialism is much like the 

“vanishing Indian” trope of Cooper and other American writers. Twain is against the 

erosion of native language and culture on principle, but he appears at least partly relieved 

at the logistical problems such a disappearance will alleviate. 

By the end of the nineteenth century, the American tourist, whether visiting 

Europe or more exotic locations, is rarely unable to find someone who speaks his or her 

language. Twain is able to “follow the equator” all of the way around the globe filling 

auditoriums with those eager to hear him speak in English, and even the Indian “god” 

who visits him has read Huck Finn (251). Thus, in contrast to the previous divide 

between “civilized” and “savage” language, Twain is able to equally mock German and 

Hindustani because neither can live up to his standard of American English, and it is 

equally unnecessary for a tourist to learn either. An extensive knowledge of foreign 

language is no longer a requirement or even a goal of cosmopolitanism. Instead, it is best 

confined to the impressive tricks of two ancillary figures who bracket the text: “the 

Maharaja of Mysore,” who can memorize random sentences in a patchwork of languages 

                                                 
51

 Werner Sollors examines the ideology of ethnicity in depth in his book Beyond 

Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. 



 

295 

(9), and Helen Keller, whose passing of Harvard University’s language examinations is a 

monument to overcoming adversity rather than a mark of usable skill (417). In light of 

such anecdotes, speaking a foreign language is about as impressive as juggling—and 

about as practical, too. In the end, the increased cosmopolitanism of the mature Samuel 

Clemens is offset in two ways: not only is the changing outlook of the man 

overshadowed by the provincialism of his persona, but the increased prevalence of the 

English language in all parts of the globe makes the linguistic proficiency of Clemens’s 

predecessors less and less necessary, even for a traveling literary celebrity. 

 

In the end, there can be no simple statement of Clemens/Twain’s views of foreign 

language and culture, but at best a two-dimensional chart with the blurred distinction 

between author and persona on one axis and the timeline of his career on the other. 

Nevertheless, some things remain clear. Twain, like both Cooper and Melville before 

him, repeatedly addresses the value of linguistic difference, the permeability of the 

language barrier, and the nature of translation. In many ways, he continues the critiques 

of his predecessors, calling attention to the dangers of mediation and the folly of those 

who flaunt linguistic or cultural knowledge as an empty sign of pretention. Yet, in 

comparison to the travel writing of Cooper and Melville, Twain’s works lack any viable 

alternative to the mediation of travel literature or the commodification of tourism. In 

many cases, he presents learning foreign language as an impossibility. Even when one 

accomplishes this difficult task, linguistic difference serves primarily as a marker of 

national belonging (or not belonging), and foreign terminology does little to convey any 

potentially enlightening cultural content. At times, Twain uses translation as a kind of 



 

296 

window into foreign speech, but by willfully misunderstanding the complicated 

transference of meaning that translation entails, his assumed linguistic innocence 

misconveys the experience, heightening the alienness of the foreign and ultimately 

suggesting that there is something inherently ridiculous in both foreign language and 

culture. Travel and translation are good jokes, but bad instructors. Near the end of his 

career, Twain becomes a strong advocate for anti-imperialism, but he never extends his 

critique to imperialist views of language. The health and safety of indigenous people 

should be preserved, but there seems to be little value in speaking to them, at least not in 

their native languages. But these views are not based in white supremacy. In contrast to 

the double standard for Western and non-Western culture at mid-century, Twain and his 

traveling American contemporaries apply the same cultural and linguistic nationalism to 

“civilized” Europeans and “primitive” savages alike.



 

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CONCLUSION 

THE NEW IMPERIALISTIC COSMOPOLITE 

The travel writings of James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, 

and their contemporaries demonstrate a strong connection between the representation of 

foreign language and the portrayal of cross-cultural exchange. Examining these writers in 

turn has also traced a trajectory of American travel that both responds to and defines 

America’s relationships with Europe and with the “uncivilized” world. Although it was 

published before a number of Twain’s own travel books, Henry James’s novel The 

American (1877) represents the endpoint of this trajectory—the new figure of the 

expatriate American.
1
 Reading the novel as part of the tradition of linguistic encounter 

elaborated in this project offers a final example of the theoretical relationships between 

linguistic, cultural, and economic exchange, demonstrating the value of foreign language 

as a lens for examining the way American authors position the United States in the world.  

Indeed, if this study of traveling Americans stopped short of the work of Henry 

James, it would be a strange omission. James’s early education abroad gave him a 

particularly worldly perspective, fostering an interest in travel and tourism that would 

continue throughout his career. There have been countless studies of James’s 

“international theme,” although opinions of how James balanced his cosmopolitanism 

                                                 
1
 It is the consensus of critics that James’s 1907 revision of The American constitutes a 

different book than the original version. Because I am less interested in the changing 

views of James across his career than in the state of American travel in the last decades of 

the nineteenth century, I will confine my discussion to the text as originally written and 

published in the 1870s. 



 

298 

with a sense of nationalism differ.
2
 Like previous travel writing, James’s international 

fiction also engages with issues of multilingualism. Daniel Katz even connects James’s 

“international theme” to the idea of translation: 

The scene of translation abounds in James; not, of course, in the most 

literal sense of the word, but certainly in a more extended one: James 

continually, even obsessively, presents the trauma of the encounter with 

the radically foreign, and the resulting need to transpose that foreign into 

the comprehensible terms of the domestic[,] . . . the attempts on the part of 

characters to hear differently the meanings of their actions within a 

different system of exchange. (15) 

As this project has demonstrated, the need to translate foreign systems of meaning, 

culture, and value into one’s own terms is a perpetual element of travel and travel 

writing. But in the case of The American, the “scene of translation” is not confined to the 

“extended” sense of the term as Katz describes it. Rather, Christopher Newman’s 

moments of cultural and economic exchange frequently occur alongside moments of 

linguistic transposition.
3
 

                                                 
2
 Sara Blair highlights the various forms of exchange involved in James’s “international 

theme” when she describes James as “one who engages in sometimes tense if fluent 

exchange with the shifting currency of nation and race, and who variously and 

contextually works to construct a cultural subject . . . liberated into a problematically, 

peculiarly ‘internationalist’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ state of reception and response” (9). 

Andrew Taylor calls James “a cosmopolitan figure in the tradition of Washington Irving 

and Margaret Fuller” (13). For Roslyn Jolly, “Henry James without travel is 

inconceivable” (343). Adeline R. Tintner finds in James’s work “a kind of 

cosmopolitanism only possible to an American who has been reared and educated in 

Europe” (2). See Robert Emmet Long for a description of James’s early education abroad 

(Henry 3-4). Annick Duperray (3) and John Carlos Rowe (“Politics” 69) both discuss 

James’s relation to nationalism. 

3
 With a similar focus, Cheryl B. Torsney argues, “At the heart of The American is 

Newman’s narrative of himself as a successful American translator with a birthright to 

raid the resources and markets of the Old World in his desire to extend his empire of 

self. . . . The American can be described as an imperial fiction with a fiction of translation 

at its core, as a novel of disappointed cultural imperialism resulting from a failure of 

translation” (41). Edwin Sill Fussell also describes James’s engagement with the foreign 



 

299 

Previous studies have also noted strong connections between The American and 

Twain’s Innocents Abroad. For example, Robert Emmet Long asserts that “The Innocents 

Abroad makes Newman plausible as he appears at the opening in the Louvre, preferring 

copies of the old masterpieces to their originals” (Henry 49). Cheryl L. Ware makes an 

extensive comparison between the two works, examining their approaches to the 

opposition of America and Europe and how “both authors explore the nature of the 

typical American and the quality of innocence they both saw as peculiarly American” 

(50-51).
4
 But in spite of these connections, the tradition of foreign language encounters in 

American travel literature reveals several key distinctions between Newman and Twain’s 

traveling Americans.  

In Twain’s travel writing, foreign language is inscrutable and unimportant. The 

Quaker City pilgrims are content to be, as Margaret Fuller puts it in her description of the 

growing tourist culture, “ciceroned” from sight to sight without any engagement with the 

culture of Europe (131). At first glance, Newman seems to conform to this model. Mrs. 

Tristram accuses Newman of being “the great Western Barbarian,” and he earns the title 

                                                                                                                                                 

in terms of language: “the Henry James who so obviously took pleasure in talking to 

himself in French is the same Henry James who shook the American dust from his feet in 

favor of the Old World and then shook the dust of England from his feet as often as 

possible in favor of the continent and its romanticism of many languages” (20-21). 

4
 There are countless other examples. Henry Seidel Canby’s Turn West, Turn East 

examines the lives and careers of Twain and James in tandem. Jeffrey Steinbrink also 

compares Newman to “Twain’s fellow Pilgrims,” asserting that both “conscientiously 

humble themselves before masterpieces of painting, architecture, and sculpture 

throughout their vagabondizing” (281). Hilton Obenzinger connects both to economics, 

arguing that “[l]ike Christopher Newman in James’s The American . . . Twain’s 

acculturation is bound by the cash nexus” (168). In their discussions of Twain’s travel 

writing, James M. Cox (17), Franklin R. Rogers (47), and Peter Messent (Cambridge 43) 

all reference Christopher Newman or The American, and Armin Paul Frank calls The 

American “James’s most Twainian romance-novel” (30). 



 

300 

in the opening Louvre scene with such gauche lapses of taste as “often admir[ing] the 

copy much more than the original” and “the damning fault . . . of confounding the merit 

of the artist with that of his work” (42, 17, 19). Yet, as the following reading will reveal, 

Newman has more in common with his cosmopolitan creator than Twain’s gauche 

persona does. Indeed, far from the “conceited American” identified by Fuller and 

epitomized by Twain’s travelers (see Scott 66), Christopher Newman falls closer to 

Fuller’s golden mean, seeking value in Europe while not becoming entirely subservient to 

European culture. Newman certainly lacks the genteel polish of Cooper’s natural 

aristocrats, but his desire to acquire the best of Europe is a model of the new American 

cosmopolitanism. 

Nevertheless, most readers of The American have taken James at his word when 

he explains that Newman “had certain practical instincts which served him excellently in 

his trade of a tourist” (65). Armin Paul Frank calls Newman “an American tourist by the 

book” (30). John Carlos Rowe similarly describes Newman “as a caricature of the 

American tourist, exhausted by his efforts to comprehend the artistic sublimity of the 

Louvre[, m]arking his Baedeker, buying bad copies of masterpieces, counting the 

churches he has visited” (“Politics” 70-71). Edwin Sill Fussell even characterizes the 

genre of The American as “Tourist Fiction” (10-11). Indeed, when we learn that, to 

Newman, “[t]he world . . . was a great bazaar, where one might stroll about and purchase 

handsome things” (66), it is not difficult to imagine him as the epitome of the acquisitive 

American tourist, checking itinerary boxes and chipping bits of rock off of priceless 

monuments. Because Newman is a thoroughly “commercial person,” his European travel 

illustrates the growing connection between mass tourism and the culture of 



 

301 

consumerism.
5
 William W. Stowe uses the terminology of Jean-Christophe Agnew to call 

this conjunction between travel and economics “acquisitive cognition, the accumulation 

of cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual capital” (168). As depicted in Innocents Abroad, the 

tourist takes what can be easily acquired and leaves the rest uncomprehended.  

On a level of economic exchange, Newman indeed epitomizes the tourist age. He 

clearly aspires to one goal William Stowe attributes to late-nineteenth-century American 

travelers—to gain “a sense of cultural legitimacy, an opportunity to turn economic power 

into cultural power, to run dollars through the machinery of the tourist infrastructure and 

convert them into cultural capital” (162). But as this study has demonstrated, just as the 

limits of linguistic translation are both caused and predicted by the difficulties of cultural 

and economic exchange in the contact zone between cultures, converting between 

systems of culture and currency is never straightforward. James explores this 

incommensurability in the opening scene of his novel, when the invaluable high culture 

of the museum, and of Europe more broadly, is brought into the marketplace as Newman 

commences bargaining for Noémie’s copy. James further explores the relation between 

artworks and commodities when Newman discusses his purchase with Mr. Tristram: 

“Bought a picture?” said Mr. Tristram, looking vaguely round at the 

walls. “Why, do they sell them?” 

“I mean a copy.” 

“Oh, I see. These,” said Mr. Tristram, nodding at the Titians and 

Vandykes, “these, I suppose, are originals?” 

                                                 
5
 Several critics have noted the importance of economics in James. For example, Jessica 

Berman argues that “the notion of the cosmopolitan for James . . . is always bound up 

with the conflict between local and global affiliations as well as with the problem of 

commerce” (140). Miranda El-Rayess further describes James’s complex relationship 

with consumerism, asserting that “[h]is skilful [sic] appropriations of the structure and 

devices of the shop window reflect his understanding of, and susceptibility to, the 

pervasive influence of contemporary consumer culture” (136). 



 

302 

“I hope so,” cried Newman. “I don’t want a copy of a copy.” (27) 

Thus, Newman adheres to some desire for “authenticity,” but only at a remove. 

Moreover, by asking his initial, naive question, Tristram raises the possibility that the 

previously priceless artworks may indeed be available for purchase, at least if the price is 

set correctly. Michael Cronin’s comparison of translation to forgery adds an interesting 

dimension to this scene. Cronin explains that translators are often encouraged conceal the 

act of translation so that “[t]he text [reads] like an original” or “a successful forgery,” and 

further, that “poor translations resemble nothing more than sloppy reproductions” 

(“History” 40). Noémie’s own “sloppy reproduction,” both of the paintings she copies 

and of the deportment of a true lady like Claire de Cintré (C. Porter 109), parallels the 

novel’s many examples of translation. Thus, the novel’s plot can be read as a series of 

attempted exchanges between language, culture, and currency, although such translations 

never achieve perfect equivalency.
6
 

But closer examination reveals that Newman is not quite the typical tourist. 

Despite his acquisitive nature, or perhaps because of it, Newman demonstrates a far 

stronger desire to make the most of his travels than the average American abroad. While 

                                                 
6
 This play with various systems of value has been observed before. Focusing on the 

exchange of women, Carolyn Porter argues, “[Newman’s] desire is unfulfillable. For the 

transcendent value he seeks to possess is by definition untranslatable into money. In 

seeking to marry Claire de Cintré, Newman wishes to acquire the unacquirable. If he 

were to succeed, she would have become acquirable” (104). Further comparing the 

women in the novel to artworks, Porter continues, “In short, the painting’s transcendent 

value as an aesthetic object depends upon its being priceless, upon its being removed 

from circulation in the art market and placed beyond the reach of money. The difference 

between an original and a copy, then, . . . depends upon its distinction from an economic 

order of value. In short, the aesthetic value of an object is designated by the sign ‘not for 

sale’” (107). Mark Seltzer’s reading of The American also examines how “aesthetic and 

sexual matters are not outside of or opposed to the economic, but rather are bound up 

with it, through and through and from the start” (134). 



 

303 

Mr. Tristram admits to never having been to the Louvre in six years of Parisian residence, 

Newman insists that he “should have come here once a week” (29). Newman further 

claims he wants to “get the best out of [Europe he] can” and insists, “I want the biggest 

kind of entertainment a man can get. People, places, art, nature, everything! I want to see 

the tallest mountains, and the bluest lakes, and the finest pictures, and the handsomest 

churches, and the most celebrated men, and the most beautiful women” (35). Newman’s 

desire for the superlatives of Europe may be arrogant and acquisitive, but it also reveals a 

genuine interest in the best rather than the most famous, an interest that is far from the 

usual touristic attitude.  

James also endows his American with a genuine desire for intellectual growth, 

suggesting that, at least in some ways, Newman’s travel antithesizes the lack of cultural 

engagement characteristic of the beaten track: 

He had always hated to hurry to catch railroad trains, and yet he had 

always caught them; and just so an undue solicitude for “culture” seemed 

a sort of silly dawdling at the station, a proceeding properly confined to 

women, foreigners, and other unpractical persons. All this admitted, 

Newman enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current, 

as profoundly as the most zealous dilettante. One’s theories, after all, 

matter little; it is one’s humor that is the great thing. Our friend was 

intelligent, and he could not help that. He lounged through Belgium and 

Holland and the Rhineland, through Switzerland and Northern Italy, 

planning about nothing, but seeing everything. (67) 

In Views A-Foot, Bayard Taylor described “English tourists” who were so engrossed in 

their guidebooks that “they sat and read about the very towns and towers they were 

passing, scarcely lifting their eyes to the real scenes” (54). This is far from Newman’s 

approach. James’s American has an outward disdain for a traveler’s “undue solicitude for 

‘culture,’” for the fixation on what one is supposed to appreciate that replaces real 

experience with the words of guidebooks. What Newman dislikes is not the culture itself 



 

304 

but the act of “dawdling” about during its supposed acquisition. Rather than dwelling on 

the process of sight-seeing, Newman wants everything to have been seen. Yet he does 

not, like the typical tourist, wish only to have the cultural capital of having been there. 

Instead, Newman wants to acquire the best of everywhere with the least effort. Achieving 

this aim, he manages to acquire the cultural content of Europe without dwelling on the 

acts of touring and traveling. Newman is both the consummate tourist and its antithesis. 

His uncanny intelligence and capacity for observation allow him to see everything 

without becoming mired in the touristic apparatus that, in attempting to facilitate the 

seeing of Europe, risks replacing genuine experience with an empty pantomime of travel. 

Newman’s unusual ability to engage in real “travel” while following the beaten 

track of tourism is mirrored in his relation to the French language. Just as Newman 

desires to see the best that Europe has to offer, he also wants to learn French. Before M. 

Nioche offers to give Newman lessons, the thought that he could learn the language had 

not crossed the American’s mind. “But isn’t it awfully difficult,” Newman asks, and he 

admits, “Hang me if I should ever have thought of it! I took for granted it was 

impossible” (24-25). And yet, once Newman believes it would be possible to learn a 

foreign language, the idea instantly appeals to him. He remarks, “I suppose that the more 

a man knows the better,” and “I suppose it would help me a great deal, knocking about 

Paris, to know the language” (24). Just like Cooper and other earlier travelers, Newman 

regards language acquisition as an aid to worthwhile travel and an intellectual 

improvement. Nevertheless, it appears that Newman’s lofty aims will be foiled by his 

own naiveté and by the duplicity of the Nioches. Noémie’s father has never taught French 

before, and “[i]t never occurred to Newman to ask him for a guarantee of his skill in 



 

305 

imparting instruction” (24). The reader is thus led to believe that, due to the American’s 

innocence in such worldly matters, the quality of Newman’s French instruction will be no 

better than that of the odious copy he has just purchased.  

Despite this flaw in Newman’s instruction, he appears peculiarly successful in his 

plan to learn French.
7
 Even before the lessons begin, Newman is able to ask a local 

woman a question because “[h]e had begun to learn French” (51). Later, Noémie’s praise 

of Newman’s progress may not be entirely trustworthy, but the American responds to her 

banter with an apropos French phrase, “proving that he had learned more French than he 

admitted” (62). Indeed, M. Nioche’s instruction must be better than either man could 

have hoped, for by the end of the novel, Newman is able to “translate poor M. de 

Bellegarde’s French” for Mrs. Bread, who has lived in France for decades (268). Later, 

when Newman meets Urbain’s wife outside of the convent, they appear to have a 

complex and detailed conversation in French. At the end of a long paragraph of Madame 

de Bellegarde’s speech, James adds, “‘You know’—this was said in English—‘we have a 

plan for a little amusement’” (279). If, as this interjection seems to indicate, the rest of 

the conversation was in French, Newman has attained a degree of fluency to rival that of 

James himself. Thus, while Newman’s commercialism and his provincial behavior in the 

Louvre seem to mark him as the crass epitome of the ugly American tourist, this initial 

characterization is undermined as the novel progresses by his apparent facility with 

linguistic and cultural acquisition, demonstrating how the tourism revolution can result in 

a new kind of cosmopolitanism. 

                                                 
7
 Fussell even suggests, “If The American had a subtitle it might be Learning French” 

(49). He also argues that Newman’s gradual acquisition of French is central to his 

“progressive characterization” (44). 



 

306 

 

Nevertheless, James’s treatment of French, though radically different from 

Twain’s views of foreign language, is also a significant departure from earlier models of 

linguistic cosmopolitanism. While Cooper called attention to the inherent differences of 

language, often leaving foreign language untranslated for that reason, James presents the 

translation between English and French as effortless and transparent. When Newman and 

Noémie first meet, they have an entire conversation without a common language. 

“Combien,” which James labels as “the single word which constituted the strength of 

[Newman’s] French vocabulary,” may be sufficient to indicate that the American wishes 

to purchase Noémie’s execrable copy, but their exchange is saturated with further 

interpretive leaps (19). When Noémie remarks, “It’s a very beautiful subject,” Newman is 

able to reply, “The Madonna, yes” (19-20). When Noémie justifies her exorbitant price 

by saying, “But my copy has remarkable qualities; it is worth nothing less,” James 

explains Newman’s uncanny comprehension only so far as to remark that the American 

“apprehended, by a natural instinct, the meaning of the young woman’s phrase” (20). In 

the exchange that follows, James ingeniously ends each statement with an English-French 

cognate—finish, delicate, address, constant, capricious—implying that each interlocutor 

has caught this final word and used its likely translation to guess the entire statement’s 

meaning. For example, when Newman insists, “I am very faithful, I am very constant. 

Comprenez?” Noémie is able to reply, “Monsieur is constant. I understand perfectly” 

(21). Despite the obvious help of shared vocabulary, such partial understanding can be 

just as faulty as total incomprehension, as Cooper’s treatment of imperfect cross-cultural 

communication has demonstrated. But Newman and Noémie are remarkable for their 



 

307 

ability to bypass any difficulties of grammar or variations in pronunciation. James makes 

some effort to explain this half-magical understanding as a combination of intuition and 

being a person “upon whom nothing is lost” (cf. James’s “House of Fiction”), but the 

ease, accuracy, and frequency with which Newman makes such guesses combine to 

create the impression that the “language barrier” between the Americans and the French 

is so permeable as to be hardly a barrier at all. 

Indeed, Christopher Newman’s encounter with the Old World has as much in 

common with Cooper’s presentation of Columbus as with the earlier author’s European 

travels. When Columbus encountered the natives of the Caribbean, he marveled at the 

utter alienness of their language and culture, but at the same time laid claim to an almost 

supernatural perception of their meaning, at least when such meaning suited his purposes. 

At the time of Cooper’s career, the Americans involved in the United States’ own 

exploration and expansion shared Columbus’s Orientalist approach to cultural difference 

and his expectation of transparent translation. In contrast, Americans traveling to Europe 

in the same period tended to value both the languages and the cultures they encountered 

in the Old World. In The American, however, James presents an encounter with French 

that mirrors Columbus’s reaction to the native Caribbean languages rather than Cooper’s 

travel to Europe.  

Following the exchange of cognates just cited, Newman and Noémie discuss his 

namesake: 

“Droll?” said Mr. Newman, laughing too. “Did you ever hear of 

Christopher Columbus?” 

“Bien sûr! He invented America; a very great man. And he is your 

patron?” 

“My patron?” 

“Your patron-saint, in the calendar.” 



 

308 

“Oh, exactly, my parents named me for him.” 

“Monsieur is American?” 

“Don’t you see it?” monsieur inquired. 

“And you mean to carry my little picture away over there?” and she 

explained her phrase with a gesture. (21). 

Newman echoes Columbus by crossing the Atlantic to find “a new world” (35). But he 

also shares the admiral’s claimed ability to understand the various signs and gestures of 

the people he meets in that foreign land with little doubt or difficulty. Newman and 

Noémie’s mutual understanding may be believable, but only barely. When describing 

Newman’s touristic acumen later in the novel, James summarizes his faculty of seamless 

interpretation: “he emerged from dialogues in foreign tongues, of which he had, formally, 

not understood a word, in full possession of the particular fact he had desired to 

ascertain” (66). Like Columbus searching for signs of land, gold, or the Great Kahn, 

Newman always seems able to comprehend the information he seeks, possessing it as 

fully as Columbus claimed to possess the New World for Spain. At the same time, 

Newman also mirrors Columbus in his condescending bemusement with the differences 

of the country he visits. When Valentin warns Newman that his family are “a very 

strange people,” the American responds, “Very good . . . that’s the sort of thing I came to 

Europe for. You come into my programme” (109). This paradoxical combination of 

incomprehensible exoticism and easy translatability mirrors perfectly the attitudes not 

only of Columbus but of most Americans and Europeans in colonial or imperial 

encounters. As Sara Blair has argued at length, James’s work shares numerous affinities 

with the genre of ethnography, although Blair argues that it is the “American ‘national 



 

309 

type’” that is “comparatively ‘savage’” (15).
8
 In contrast, the several parallels between 

Newman and Columbus suggest, as Rowe observes, that Newman is as much imperialist 

as “barbarian” (“Henry” 231; “Nationalism” 253). In The American, the ethnographer’s 

view of foreignness has been translated from savage others to the previously admired 

culture of Europe. 

Moreover, as in Mercedes of Castile, in which Cooper juxtaposes issues of 

linguistic translation with the similar incommensurability of economic exchange between 

cultures, Newman’s lessons in French, though framed as gentlemanly conversation, are 

perpetually imbricated in the marketplace of economic exchange. From the beginning, 

not only does Noémie suggest the lessons as yet another way to open the American’s 

pocketbook, but her father admits that he has learned English from “a great commerçant” 

who got the young Nioche a position at “a counting-house in England” (25). This 

influence on Nioche’s English partially explains why one benefit of the lessons for 

Newman is “an interest in French thriftiness” and “a lively admiration for Parisian 

economics” (56). Moreover, the lessons commence as part of the bargain for several 

additional copies that Newman will purchase to help pay Noémie’s dowry—her own 

price, although not the one she ends up accepting. Newman’s French is thus one more 

commodity in a marketplace including culture, knowledge, and women (see note 6). A 

later description of the lessons further heightens this connection between language and 

economics. James writes, “The shrunken little capitalist repeated his visit more than once. 

He seemed oppressed by a humiliating sense of having been overpaid, and wished 

                                                 
8
 Similarly, in her study of the novel of manners, Nancy Bentley compares James and 

several other writers to ethnographers (4). 



 

310 

apparently to redeem his debt by offer of grammatical and statistical information in small 

installments” (128-29). Although the initial bargain was made with the promise of real 

Parisian conversation and without setting a price, Nioche’s visits are purely economic 

endeavors. For him, language is a commodity that he can use to offset Newman’s 

previous generosity. He balances the need for a kind of ethical solvency with the desire 

for monetary gain. Thus, James follows both Cooper and Melville in portraying the 

transference of translation as one of the many exchanges of goods and meaning across 

different cultures.  

When Newman is rejected by the Bellegardes for such interest in commerce, 

however, he again takes the position of Columbus, devaluing as trifles the currency of a 

system of exchange he cannot understand. Some time after the blow of losing Claire, 

Newman observes the “stream of carriages” in Hyde Park:  

Newman, as usual, marveled at the strange dingy figures which he saw 

taking the air in some of the stateliest vehicles. They reminded him of 

what he had read of eastern and southern countries, in which grotesque 

idols and fetiches were sometimes taken out of their temples and carried 

abroad in golden chariots to be displayed to the multitude. (295-96) 

Not only does Newman reject the value of the ancient and noble heritage that has made 

such figures so “dingy,” but, like any American imperialist, he labels as “fetish” and 

“grotesque” what he cannot understand. Although her focus is on James’s later work, 

Nancy Bentley has closely examined the affinity between “[t]he fetishizing descriptions 

of furniture and art that we see in the pages of James or Veblen” and the genre of 

ethnography (126). She explains that, while “[t]he fetish was a sign for the unreal or 

irrational value, . . . the sign itself had acquired a new reality from the museum and from 

the shared public discourse through which a solid world of commodities was named” 



 

311 

(127). In The American, too, James questions the value of the nobility he seems to 

fetishize, but this labeling of the foreign as incomprehensible can indicate a rejection of 

difference as well as the enlightened critique of commodity culture Bentley suggests.
9
 In 

the end, this correspondence with imperialist depictions of cross-cultural exchange 

confirms Rowe’s suggestion that “The American may well be a subtle warning to James’s 

readers, as well as to James’s own literary ambitions, that the international destiny of the 

self-reliant American may have more in common with the imperial claimants of [Europe] 

than we in our democratic enthusiasm are willing to admit” (“Politics” 93). Reading the 

economic exchanges in the novel alongside the history of linguistic encounters in 

American travel writing reveals the growing similarity between America’s relations to its 

imperial possessions and its attitudes toward the rest of the “civilized” world.  

Indeed, the suggestion of fetishism in Newman’s relation to the culture of Paris 

illustrates an important difference between Cooper’s cosmopolitan view of European 

cultural difference and the new cosmopolitanism of the late nineteenth century. Looking 

at James’s work more broadly, Katz describes how the “cosmopolite,” James’s archetype 

of the worldly expatriate, has a “tendency to reify others into nothing but sheer 

embodiments of a totalized cultural practice,” and that this “reification can move not only 

in the direction of prejudice, but also in what might seem the opposite: that of mystified 

adoration” (34). Whether the new American abroad scorns European difference or 

                                                 
9
 James Buzard offers yet another perspective on James’s presentation of European 

culture: “the urge to ‘take part’ in a foreign culture is chiefly demonstrable by ‘taking a 

part’ of the culture—that is by actual or imaginary acts of what James called 

‘appropriation.’ The question he repeatedly confronted, though, was whether an attempt 

to show that one has successfully appropriated a culture does not ultimately place one in 

complicity with the ‘touristic’ forces that are charged with bastardizing and 

commodifying the culture” (216). 



 

312 

fetishizes it, the blurred distinctions between the national and the foreign emphasized by 

Cooper solidify into an “us vs. them” mentality, supporting the most rigid sense of 

national boundaries. So even when the new cosmopolite becomes American expatriate, 

the barrier of cultural and linguistic difference remains just as solid as the division 

between civilization and savagery. 

 

As the preceding reading might suggest, it is extremely difficult to present a 

unified interpretation of Newman’s position in relation to both French language and 

culture. On the one hand, he seems to be the perfect model of Twain’s provincial 

American abroad, but on the other, his dedication to learning French, and to making the 

most out of his travels intellectually—instead of merely following the outer forms of 

tourism in order to acquire superficial cultural capital—suggest an affinity with an earlier 

model of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, and despite James’s own multilingualism, 

the difficulties of language difference and translation are not given the careful attention in 

The American that they receive in the European travel writing of Cooper and his 

contemporaries. Rather than feeling an admiration of foreign culture, James’s American 

approaches Europe with the assumption of easy translatability and cultural superiority 

that was once the purview of imperialist endeavors. It is not surprising, however, that 

James’s novel should contain such contradictions, because there is a radical disjuncture 

within the genre and plot of the novel itself. As the work shifts from novel of manners to 

revenge plot, the subtle play with the themes of culture, exchange, and tourism that 

characterizes the opening chapters is replaced by what several critics have identified as 

melodrama (Brooks 55; Tuttleton 104).  



 

313 

As the novel approaches its conclusion, Newman discovers that the Bellegardes’ 

old English housekeeper Mrs. Bread possesses a mysterious deathbed letter from the late 

Marquis that might implicate his widow in some horrible crime. Mrs. Bread claims not to 

have read the letter she kept for so many years because it was written in French, but 

several critics have doubted the plausibility of this story. Frank, for example, questions 

Mrs. Bread’s claim “that she does not know enough French ever to have read the note,” 

particularly “after a lifetime spent in a French household,” and further points out that if 

she in fact did not know what the note said, she would have shown more eagerness for 

Newman to translate it for her (56).
10

 

However plausible it might be that Mrs. Bread cannot read French after so long a 

residence in the country—it is difficult to comprehend, but it seems equally difficult for a 

fully literate person to imagine being able to read but not to write—her lack of curiosity 

about the letter can be explained by her belief that she already knows what it contains.
11

 

She tells Newman: 

 “I believe it was this way. He had a fit of his great pain, and he asked her 

for his medicine. Instead of giving it to him she went and poured it away, 

before his eyes. Then he saw what she meant, and, weak and helpless as 

he was, he was frightened, he was terrified. ‘You want to kill me,’ he said. 

‘Yes, M. le Marquis, I want to kill you,’ says my lady, and sits down and 

fixes her eyes upon him. You know my lady’s eyes, I think, sir; it was 

with them she killed him; it was with the terrible strong will she put into 

them.” (267) 

                                                 
10

 John A. Clair further suggests that James “deliberately draws Mrs. Bread as a scheming 

woman intent upon blackmailing the Bellegardes through Newman—or Newman 

himself, if necessary—to effect a financially secure existence for life” (615). 

11
 Fussell explains: “She speaks both English and French; she can read English only; she 

can write neither tongue” (53). 



 

314 

This scenario is undeniably melodramatic, and it is entirely understandable that Mrs. 

Bread’s certainty about what occurred should cast doubt on her story, suggesting that she 

might have played a larger role in the drama than she is inclined to admit. Yet, when 

compared to Newman’s experience of linguistic encounter, Mrs. Bread’s extrapolation of 

Madame de Bellegarde’s involvement from what little she claims to know is no less 

credible than the other moments of near-telepathic translation that occur throughout the 

novel.  

In fact, Mrs. Bread’s uncanny interpretation of the letter she supposedly cannot 

read is remarkably similar to the leaps of interpretation Newman and Noémie take in the 

opening scene. In all such examples, language difference is a non-issue. Meaning is 

available for easy appropriation in the same way that, for the ideal tourist at least, 

European culture is to be had for the taking. For the enterprising American, the once 

contrasting “civilized” culture of Europe and “savage” culture of the rest of the world are 

equally accessible and, more tellingly, equally obtainable. The real disjunction of the 

novel is not the drastic shift to melodrama, but the way the new American 

cosmopolitanism slips into a kind of cultural and linguistic imperialism. Taken as a 

whole, the plot seems to suggest that European difference is ultimately untranslatable—

Newman can never truly fathom why the Bellegardes are unable to accept a “commercial 

person.” But Newman’s inability to translate the Bellegardes’ objections into values his 

American mind can understand is offset by the apparent ease with which he acquired the 

French language and his uncanny knack for understanding complex French conversation 

after only a few months of causal study. 



 

315 

In the end, despite Newman’s regret to not have frightened the Bellegardes as 

much as he had hoped, the novel concludes with apparent admiration for what Mrs. 

Tristram calls his “remarkable good nature,” a defining characteristic of this 

representative American (309). Perhaps, then, James means the reader to think that 

Newman is better off not understanding the obscure values of the old aristocracy. In 

contrast to Twain’s linguistic difficulties, for James, most of European language and 

culture is easily acquired, and what remains—including the antique notions of honor that 

cause both Newman’s rejection and Valentin’s death—are not worth understanding. This 

conclusion is likely influenced by James’s own experiences in Paris while composing the 

novel. As Long describes: 

In one respect, James’s stay in Paris had something in common with 

Christopher Newman’s experience of it in the novel. After crossing the 

Atlantic, he proclaimed to his family: “I take possession of the old 

world—I inhale it—I appropriate it!” Yet in his letters of that year, he 

complains of his limited access to Parisian life, his failure to penetrate 

very far beyond the city’s small, enclosed American colony; and his 

columns to the Tribune continually suggest a spectator-outsider. (Henry 

46)
12

 

Peter Brooks further suggests that “it may have been James’s very cosmopolitanism that 

doomed him to outsider status” because his works did not fit into the cannon of the 

particularly French writers of Paris (48-49). Despite his usually cosmopolitan image, 

James’s early experiences in Paris reveal an impermeable barrier between American and 

                                                 
12

 Peter Brooks comments on similar feelings, explaining how, despite the fact that James 

“had the requisite command both of the French language and of French culture, and he 

had been admitted to the most exclusive literary circle in France[,] . . . he felt excluded 

and lonely” (48). Likewise Martha Banta describes how “[t]he twelve months that had 

launched the story of Christopher Newman’s confrontation with the ‘walls’ of Parisian 

society marked a difficult period during which James himself had had to come to terms 

with those elements—internal as well as external—that seemed to prevent him from 

becoming the cosmopolitan man he urgently desired to be” (7). 



 

316 

European society. Mirroring his author’s failure, Newman’s plans to join the Bellegarde 

family are also frustrated by the incommensurability of French culture, despite the 

frequent ease of linguistic translation. Yet the cultural values that Newman finds so 

incomprehensible are ultimately deemed worthless both by the rejected American and by 

his equally rejected and defensive author. The American, then, depicts a world of rigid 

national boundaries that cannot fully be crossed, even by those who might wish to do so. 

Newman may be more cosmopolite than tourist, but the new cosmopolitanism of both the 

character and his author proves far more narrowly nationalistic than the cosmopolitanism 

of earlier periods. Like the imperialism of Columbus, it combines an underestimation of 

translation’s difficulties with a strict dichotomy between one’s own culture and the 

unknowable Other. 

 

James’s novel is a fitting conclusion for this study because it presents a new 

dialectic of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. On one hand, James and the many 

American expatriates who followed him might seem to contrast sharply with the 

provinciality of Twain’s nationalistic attitudes and with the popular views of the 

American tourists Twain depicts. When viewed through the lens of translation and 

imperialist discourse, however, James’s new approach to foreign language and culture 

presents a different kind of cosmopolitanism than that found in Cooper. Cooper’s desire 

to negotiate the value of both European history and American innovation was based in a 

respect for the nuances of cultural difference. While James shares Cooper’s root desire to 

take what is valuable from Europe without denying American principles, he limits what 

he considers valuable to that which is easily translatable—both easily understood and 



 

317 

unproblematically converted to dollars and cents (or, indeed, that which easily translates 

into both dollars and sense). Anything that will not translate is not worth understanding 

on its own terms, but should be rejected outright. Despite James’s own extensive 

acquisition of European language and culture, then, his work affirms what can be seen 

throughout Twain’s travel writings—the new rigidity of national boundaries and the 

failure of the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan ideal.  

As the United States moved more firmly into the position of world power in the 

final decades of the nineteenth century, it began to view the cultural and linguistic 

differences of Europe with the prejudice previously reserved for non-Western lands. The 

changing nature of American travel to Europe is but one aspect of this shift to American 

prominence. However, as attention to the representation of foreign language reveals, the 

“ugly American” tourist depicted by both Twain and James is the product not only of the 

mass culture of tourism, but also of the expansionist and imperialist policies of the United 

States on a global scale. Newman’s fetishization of European culture thus represents a 

new kind of Orientalism that could be called, unmelodiously, Old World-ism. Whether 

admired or scored, European differences are reified, even by the new breed of 

cosmopolitan expatriates that James describes.  

Accordingly, while the acceptance of Western and non-Western difference found 

in Cooper and Melville represents the continuation of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in 

the first half of the nineteenth century, Twain and James depict two new attitudes toward 

cultural difference arising from the United States’ increased prominence on the 

international stage. The “ugly American” tourists Twain describes are the precursors to 

the countless ignorant and xenophobic travelers who continued to depart America’s 



 

318 

shores well into the twentieth century. Yet the high-brow bastions of culture are not 

immune to the same nationalistic trend, as the example of James demonstrates. At the 

turn of the twentieth century, even the cosmopolitan expatriate approached national 

boundaries with the imperialistic attitudes of assimilation and disavowal, not with the 

Enlightenment’s true, open-minded internationalism.



 

319 

REFERENCES CITED 

Adams, Charles H. “Uniformity and Progress: The Natural History of The Crater.” James 

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