The Thinking, Walking Biped, part nine. Other famous walks, of varying quality

Other writers, besides those described in earlier essays, have taken extensive nature walks for a variety of creative purposes. Here are just a few examples.

• Estwick Evans was a New Hampshire lawyer who started a four thousand mile journey in 1818 which took him to Detroit, which was at the time on the deep frontier. Most of this journey was on foot. His purpose was not primarily to learn about the natural, but about the human, world. He visited many Native and white American settlements. He saw what he expected to see: that the westward expansion of America was, by and large, a good thing for everyone.
• Philip Freneau was an American poet who did a lot of walking in nature, though not, as far as I can tell, any one single long journey. His principal motivation was to see the Native viewpoint on the natural world.
• Graham Greene was a British novelist who took a 350-mile trip through Liberia in the early twentieth century, as described in Journey without Maps. But he was not primarily observing Africa. He brought a whole cavalcade of prejudices with him. He had 25 porters, six boxes of food, beds, chairs, and a bathtub. His journey can best be described as imposing itself on Africa. His motivation, he said, was H. Rider Haggard’s She, which was a novel about an almost vanished white African civilization. Greene took an American map that labeled this part of Africa simply as “cannibals.” He wanted to see evidence of white supremacy in Africa, and this is what he saw.

The usual situation, in these journeys, was that the white traveler came with expectations of what he would see, and gathered observations that reinforced them.