In our own times, the environment has generally been understood to be an external force, or something “out there.”  However, a linguistic analysis of the history of “nature” reveals that the environment can also be seen as something internal, or “within.”  Curiously, some of the most important ways that the environment has been perceived as an internal force relates to gender metaphors.  Celestial bodies like the sun and moon, for example, have often been described in terms of gender, with the majority of cultures claiming the sun as a “masculine” entity and relegating the lunar body to the female camp. [1]   While the natural world has on some occasions been described in masculine terms, (as in the description of the territorial nation-state as a “fatherland”), more often than not the feminine construction has historically dominated the realm of the natural.  Feminine imagery has often been used in reference to our own terrestrial sphere, exemplified in such phrases as “Mother Earth,” the “motherland,” and “virginal” forests.  Even the more destructive forces of nature, such as hurricanes, were, at least until 1965, given women’s names.  Creative forces related to fertility have also had long associative links to the female gender.  This female metaphorical prevalence has made it common to conceive of nature as female and culture as male. [2]   Even while the productive side of “culture” has stereotypically been considered masculine, its reproductive side remained female.  This was especially true in the case of Victorian culture, the bourgeois division between public and private spheres, and late nineteenth century Spanish-American culture.  This essay will use the travel accounts of Rosa Carneigie-Williams, Edith Brown and Mary McCarty, and General Rafael Reyes as case studies for examining Victorian, bourgeois, and Spanish-American cultural perspectives on the Columbian environment.
        Gender and nature have frequently exchanged metaphors in the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  For example, the tropical jungle was frequently referred to as a woman, and, conversely, women were often described as being wild, like jungles. [3]   Equally important connections were also made between nature, gender, and the supposed stages of cultural development.  The most prevalent mode of describing “culture” at that time was through the concept of “civilization.”  If, in general terms, “civilization” was closely associated with a stage of human progress that is sedentary, urbanized, and agricultural, it was also a concept with implicit gendered connotations.  As historian Gail Bederman has persuasively argued in her book, Manliness and Civilization, there was a deeply virile strain to the North American discourse of “civilization” in the early twentieth century Progressive Era. [4]   Their South American counterparts, and particularly the conservative Colombian elite, were no less forceful in insinuating masculinity into the discourse of “civilization” within the framework of their country’s Hispanic heritage.
        This engendered idea of civilization probably is best understood in the context of its opposites: barbarism and savagery.  Both concepts are also related to nature.  Barbarism, for example, was usually applied to nomadic peoples and their domestic animals, while the epithet of savagery was generally reserved for “primitive” hunter-gatherers of the forest whose relation to the land required seasonal mobility.  Late-nineteenth century Western intellectuals denigrated the latter groups for holding to a communal land ethic and for having less clearly defined societal divisions based on sex and gender roles.  In contrast, “civilized” ladies of the Victorian age were relegated to a more segregated social sphere and domestic duties.
        While environmental history has recently emerged as a separate subfield, it has only just begun to take gender into consideration.  Eco-feminist perspectives have been an important part of environmental literature, although many of these works tend to lack historical perspective. [5]   So, while environmental history still tends to be “gender-less,” eco-feminism has remained relatively “history-less.” [6]   Despite the importance of traveler relations, the connections between nature-gender and travel have yet to be “discovered,” “explored,” or “mapped.” [7]    The main objective of this essay is to explore the subject in nineteenth century Colombia to pioneer some possible routes to link these diverse academic “continents.”
        This study explores, describes, and analyzes male/female differential constructions of nature during the period of liberalization of nature in Colombia, 1850-1930.  Two basic mechanisms were part of the scenario of transformations of nature during the second part of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century.  The first was related to the systematic transfer of public, collective and corporate land into private hands and the reorganization of the relationship between private and public law.  The second mechanism was choreographic, and included an attempt to invent the nation-state in the aftermath of the Independence wars both by mapping the territorial borders and by trying to integrate some of the internal frontier areas and “wild” lowland regions peopled by “uncivilized” indigenous peoples.  While they succeeded in establishing clearly defined external and internal administrative borders, they were less successful in overcoming the challenges posed by a fragmented Columbian landscape.
        Legal and cartographic mechanisms impelled a transformation of nature that, for the most part, was symbolic rather than material.  Engendered differential perceptions of the landscape are part of this symbolic appropriation and transformation of nature.  Within the context of this changing landscape, travelers crossed the country and wrote down their impressions.  This paper concentrates on travelers’ accounts interpreting them not as an objective information, but as part of the engendered vision of nature held by literate Colombian and foreign elite.
        Before describing and analyzing travel writing in the second part of the nineteenth century, some antecedents are necessary to understand cultural understandings of nature, particularly, through the pioneering work of naturalists and explorers, Alexander Von Humboldt and Jose Celestino Mutis (The Wise).  Their visions are important so far they envisioned ideals about nature that later were undertaken by patriots and Creoles in New Granada and other Latin American countries.

        The wars of Independence interrupted a slow process of economic transformation in the former Spanish colonies fueled by a new dynasty influenced by “enlightened” thinking.  After the Bourbons replaced the Habsburgs, the Empire had begun moving toward more pragmatic and market-oriented policies.  In part, it mirrored a transformation from a mercantilist economy largely concerned with the extraction of precious metals towards one based on agricultural production.  These new orientations were trapped in contradictions with the Crown’s territorial imperatives and war policies.  Leaders of the Creole independence movements in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century were caught up in a military confrontation, and in the formulation of a new body of laws and institutions. [8]   Drastic economic transformations had to wait until the middle of the century, when a liberal and progressive elite took the reins of government.  This newly empowered American elite envisioned a Colombian nation linked in the international division of labor based on comparative advantages in a so-called free trade economy.
        Territorial organization of the state was also a formidable task, as the destruction of imperial ties forced the newly independent nation to redefine the former territorial logic of Empire.  In colonial times, precious metals and other riches from Peru and Ecuador were siphoned off to the Spanish metropole via Panama (then, part of Colombia).  Links between the most populated part of present-day Colombia went through the eastern chain of the Andes, connecting Santa Fe de Bogotá, Socorro, Velez, Pamplona, Ocana and Mérida (in what is today Venezuela) with Lake Maracaibo.  Territorial reorganization after independence broke former bonds when the relation between the center and the periphery changed. [9]
        The liberal elite of the mid-nineteenth century justified their reforms by citing the need to do away with backwardness associated with colonial institutions and traditions. [10]   However, these traditions were really closer to the old colonial system of the Hapsburgs rather than the more progressive Bourbons of the eighteenth century.  With the exception of some fiscal policies implemented by the Bourbons to support the Empire, the new elite had much in common with the Enlightenment Bourbons: they were market-oriented, and encouraged secular education at the expense of the traditional power of the Church.  In contrast to the colonial regime, however, the young republics based their policies on teachings in classic political economy, which advocated an anti-interventionist liberal state.  Irronically, the post-independence liberal elite took up where the Bourbons had left off.
        In the second part of the eighteenth century, colonial encomienda and mita labor systems and mining projects were rendered obsolete by the vigor of the British and French plantation systems, the potential of industrial transformation in Western Europe, and the emerging Dutch commercial empire.  Naturalist expeditions and other scientific efforts backed by the Spanish Crown in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries should be viewed in the context of this new economic orientation.  Scientific activities were carried out with the goal of finding new possibilities for profitable enterprises.  This was the context both of José Celestino Mutis’s botanical expedition in New Granada and Alexander von Humboldt’s travels to South America. [11]   This last case was exceptional, since foreigners (non-Spaniards) were not officially allowed to travel to the Spanish colonies.
        Both Alexander von Humboldt and José Celestino Mutis provided a dual model of nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both a classificatory naturalist Enlightenment view and a cosmic Romantic one.  They wrote at a time when Western naturalists found in Linnaeus, a Swedish scientist, the first and crucial classificatory scheme to create order in nature.  Using Latin as a neutral European language to standardize knowledge, naturalists were provided with a powerful depoliticized means of international communication in the eighteenth century. This classificatory system furthered knowledge of the living (non-human) world by grouping flora and fauna together.  Mutis applied this scientific enterprise to the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
        Humboldt went further.  Not content with describing the environment in purely scientific terms, he imbued his work with his own Romantic view of nature.  He was not only the developer of a scientific enterprise, but he was, in a way, an inventor.  He was the inspiration for a new sense of nature: the Romantic, cosmic point of view.  Furthermore, although he offered a European non-Enlightenment conception of nature opposed to the positivist point of view, he was the reference point for Creoles, patriots, and fighters for independence in the first part of the nineteenth century.  His vision constituted the basis for constructing a new identity for the tropical countries of America. [12]   Agustín Codazzi’s cartographic expedition to map Colombia in the mid-nineteenth century was an example of the post-independence elite picking up a process initiated by the Bourbons and interrupted by the independence wars and the following decades. [13]   Territorial organization and knowledge of the country’s resources was needed in the mid-nineteenth century elite to forge new diplomatic and economic ties with the international market.  Mapping the country was an essential part of an administrative scheme designed to balance powerful regional elite, make an inventory of resources, and obtain valuable military information in a period of permanent civil war.  Before moving to specific travel accounts the reader should be aware of the growing literature on women travel writing.

        There is a large body of travel literature written by men.  Beginning in the fifteenth century, explorers, missionaries, and cartographers chronicled and documented the European voyages of discovery and conquests.  The travel accounts did not end with the age of discovery, but continued into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and beyond) with new scientific motivations.  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, travelers interested in botany and zoology documented their travels in remote and exotic places.  And in a time of expanding European imperialism, diplomats became important agents of the production of knowledge in the nineteenth century as they recorded their impressions of “under-developed” regions and “untapped” natural resources. [14]
        Despite the prevalence of male travel writers, women’s travel accounts are not entirely lacking, and a fresh body of secondary literary analysis has grown up around newly “recovered” relations.  Jane Robinson, Rebeca Stefoff, Marion Tinling, Billie Melman, and June Hahner and other feminist historians have worked to disseminate and analyze such accounts as have been found. [15]   Although it is possible to find women’s travel accounts prior to the nineteenth century, since then two important changes have occurred.  The first is the growing quantity of such works, and the second is a new vision of women as independent agents, the result of the construction of a new female subjectivity.
        Hahner asserts that in the nineteenth century a small but growing number of women began to travel in an effort to enlighten and entertain their contemporaries.  Their accounts of their travels became both a genre of literature and a source for social history. The loosening of travel restrictions and the European economic expansion facilitated women’s traveling during the second part of the nineteenth century.  They joined explorers, merchants, mineralogists, engineers, agronomists and military men on their tour of duty in foreign lands.  Most of the attention of these historians has centered on British women who traveled to the Orient.  The majority of women who traveled to Latin America visited Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. [16]   Columbia was not a preferred destination for several reasons.  The first was the perception, widely held by Northern Europeans, that Columbia was one of those “unhealthy” tropical countries to be avoided.  Neither could the country boast of economic attractions or rich environmental resources.  Moreover, the near-permanent state of civil war that plagued the country from the post-independence period on into the nineteenth century also served to discourage both entrepreneurs and “tourists.”  Even so, it seems unlikely that Rosa Carneigie-Williams was the only woman to write an account of her travels in Colombia at that time. [17]

        In 1846, General Mosquera, president of New Granada, appointed Manuel Ancizar as diplomatic agent in Venezuela.  Two years later, President Mosquera invited Codazzi, a colonel who had fought in the independence wars with Bolivar and Mosquera and who had more recently mapped neighboring Venezuela, to lead an expedition an official expedition to map Colombia’s borders.  Ancizar accompanied Codazzi around the central highlands and wrote Peregrinacion de Alpha (Alpha’s Pilgrimage) based on their travels. [18]
        Ancizar was born in the central highlands of Bogotá on December 25, 1812, but emigrated from New Granada with his family after 1819 because his father was a Spaniard.  He earned a law degree in Cuba and, after a conspiracy there to proclaim the island’s independence, moved to Caracas in 1832 where he was later appointed chancellor of the Colegio de Valencia in Venezuela.  Following his adventures with the Codazzi surveying expedition, Ancizar was appointed president of the recently funded National University of Colombia.
        Ancizar’s travels were primarily in the central and most populated provinces of New Granada’s heartland.  At the time of his travels, the capital of Bogotá exercised little or no actual control over the peripheral regions of the country, and held this tenuous geopolitical position, partly as a legacy of colonial times, but also for symbolic and environmental reasons.  The Bogotá highlands and hinterlands had traditionally been home to the Chibcha-speaking Muisca peoples, whose agricultural prowess and culture had impressed the invading Spaniards as the most advanced in all of New Granada.  This densely-populated, temperate, and agriculturally-rich region naturally attracted the attention of invaders interested in imposing a tributary economy and growing familiar crops.  Bogotá had the potential of becoming the most “European” of all the regions of tropical New Granada, with the necessary conditions for livestock raising and growing European plants such as wheat, oak, barley, and flowers of European origin including roses. [19]
        Ancizar’s trip began in Bogotá, crossed the plain and went over the eastern Andes to end in Venezuela.  The mountain range at that point descends to the west to the warm and hot slopes of the rivers that break the Andes, and to the east to the prairies, the Llanos cowboy’s lowlands.  Considering Ancizar’s Western education and his mission to map the country, one might expect him to have penned a dry and precise cartographic account of his travels.  Ironically, though, his narration is more sociological and literary than scientific, combining Humboldt’s romanticism with a post-Independence perspective.  He appears to be interested in building a new Columbian identity that is neither exclusively European nor American, but something at the same time old and completely new.  Traces of the ancient past of Chibcha civilization, an amalgamation of Indian and Spanish cultures, and also remnants of European peoples can be contrasted with a sense of a foundational new age.
        Like other good liberals of his time, Ancizar believed in progress, but he was also critical of Spanish civilization.  Ancizar also believed that having endured three centuries of Spanish domination, the culture of the Chibchas had degenerated.  He argued that the destruction of Indian culture was effected not merely by the bloody conquest, but by economic transformations imposed in its wake.  Following the decline of the colonial mining industry and tributary economy, the Bourbons had authorized a limited division of Indian lands.  Because of their commitment to the creed of the absolute right to private property, the liberals who dominated the post-Independence in the 1860s completed the transformation of the remnants of the shattered Chibcha society.  In the best cases, the surviving Indian peoples became small peasant landowners.  In the worse cases, the dispossessed Indians found work as domestic laborers in the capital and provincial cities, or turned to begging for their sustenance. [20]
        Ancizar believed that before the Chibchas were conquered and brought low, they had been more “civilized” than their Spanish contemporaries.  Since they were settled agriculturalists living in urban centers, they qualified as “civilized” under the popular enlightenment definition, while the pastoral, cattle-raising Spaniards who displaced them struck Ancizar as closer to the definition of “barbarism.”[21]   Ancizar was quick to blame the Spanish heritage for the backwardness he encountered in his travels.  In visiting Zipaquira, for example, Ancizar wrote that the expense incurred in building this city’s monumental church was wasted when such funds might have instead been used to build roads or schools.  “Spanish genius, how adverse you are to the solid and truthful social progress!” he lamented. [22]
        In searching for an alternative heritage on which to build the new Colombian nation, Ancizar wrote nostalgically of the Indian culture that had been corrupted and degraded by the Spanish conquest.  His longing for the “lost” civilization of the Chibchas was part and parcel of the Creole intellectual search for a new fatherland.  Ancizar argued, for example, that the original Chibcha housing was superior to that of the current inhabitants.  His romantic notions of noble indigenous peoples were shocked by the degeneration of Chibcha culture in the wake of the humiliation and brutality imposed upon them by Spaniards. [23]
        Colombia’s mid-elevations and lowlands were home to hopes and dangers: most of the tropical products in demand in the international market were located in regions populated by “savages” and “semi-civilized” Indians, and were host to a variety of deadly or debilitating diseases.  While Ancizar lamented the decline of the “civilized” Chibcha Indians who settled the temperate highlands, he was more ambivalent towards the semi-sedentary Tunebo peoples of the highlands, and the “savages” who lived in the warmer regions.  Tamnez was another name for the Tunebos who lived further inside the Sierra Nevada in a place only accessible from the Casanare (in the Llanos).  Several groups of these Tunebos were called Royata, Sinsiga, Covaria, or Ritambria.  Speaking bad Castilian, they told that an old Indian became Christian and spread the Gospel.  They called themselves rationales to differentiate themselves from other indigenous peoples, whom they call pagans.  Ancizar believed that these people would be the next victims of civilization.  The Tunebos had survived and maintained their independence thus far only because it was necessary to cross mountains and deserts from the Llanos to reach them.  And yet, Ancizar did not doubt that this splendid isolation would end, quoting a friend who was traveling with him, who argued, “It is necessary to visit this people, invading them by way of Casanare.”[24]
        In describing the Aripies, fierce Indian warriors of the hotlands, Ancizar did not romanticize them, but rather held them to be “savages.”  Traditional enemies of the semi-civilized Muzos who worked in the emerald mines, these Indians had refused resguardos (reservations) from the government and resisted attempts to enslave them and make them laborers.  Reflecting on their future fate, Ancizar predicted that the Aripies’ the borders of their autonomous territory would to shrink, and led the author to wonder how the people of the forest were going to learn to love civilization if that state was intent on dispossessing them? [25]
        Ancizar was at once a romantic and a progressive: romantic in the sense of his nostalgic longing for the world that had been lost, and progressive to the extent that he was firmly committed to building a new liberal society in its stead.  The Chibchas may have been a high agricultural civilization, but they had been degenerated by defeat and humiliation and did not offer a viable foundation for the future Colombian state. [26]   Rather, he saw racial mixing as producing a good balance between Spanish impetuosity and the calm and patient Chibcha Indians.  Ancizar was romantic in the sense that his narrative resembles the cosmic founding of a new age immersed in splendid, overwhelming nature.  Through his narration he finds not simply a country but his roots, his identity.  For him the past is lost in terms of culture, but not in terms of nature.
        Women are almost absent in Ancizar’s writings.  Only a few examples hint at their presence.  In one episode he describes the old, bitter owner of a miserable lodging house in Ubate.  This woman was the jealous guardian of a chubby-cheeked, disheveled young woman, and Ancizar opted not to visit the kitchen for fear of losing his appetite. [27]   A pilgrimage to the Chiquinquira Virgin revealed the presence of a broad range of women of various classes.  Ancizar made note of the finely dressed urban lady who traveled with her chaperon; a rich and fat peasant woman; three or four women relatives accompanied by a peasant.  Ancizar’s travelogue reveals that even the lower-class Bogotá woman of Indian origin and traditional dress, contemptuously called guaricha, went to see the Virgin.[28]   In Chiquinquira he noted that the ladies lived modestly and secluded, and that they rarely appeared in public except enroute to Sunday Mass.  No wonder, he speculated, monastic customs were so widespread in this region where the woman’s role was to set an example for their children to follow and to act as subordinates in domestic life. [29]
        Although the region through which he passed was the country’s most populous in the mid-nineteenth century Colombia, Ancizar found “primeval” and “virginal” forest wherever he traveled—untouched, unpenetrated vegetation, free from man’s presence, he asserts.  Even in Velez, an old Spanish town, Ancizar claimed to find virginal Andean forests. [30]   Why are forests and virgins are so closely related semantically in his writings?  Perhaps he was unconsciously hinting that the hand of a young and virile civilization was required to transform these “virginal” strands into “productive” lands or else see them wither away unused and barren.  Certainly at the time of Ancizar’s writing, the anticlerical liberal elite were set on challenging sacred beliefs and old-fashioned religious notions.  Forests were not seen as sacred groves but viewed as potential board feet of lumber to be used in progressive projects to bring civility to the savage regions.  Virgin forests were thus losing their spiritual protectors.

        While Ancizar’s cartographic explorations departed from Colombia’s geographical and political center in the densely-populated highlands, Rosa Carneigie-Williams entered the country by ship, arriving in the bustling Republican port of Barranquilla on Colombia’s Caribbean coast and proceeding inland by way of the Magdalena River.  She departed from Southampton, England on August 2, 1881, and had undertaken the voyage to accompany her mining engineer husband, one of several foreigners interested in the commerce and the promised wealth of the new Latin American countries in the second part of the nineteenth century. [31]
        In addition to the plains of Bogotá, described in Ancizar’s account, Carneigie –Williams described two geographical regions that had only recently become vital to the economic interests of the emerging nation.  The first was the Caribbean coastal region, and the new riverside city of Barranquilla.  This port city, whose growth was fueled by the international commerce, eventually surpassed the colonial ports of Cartagena and Santa Marta in importance.  Second was the Magdalena River region, a vital means of communication and commerce since it connected Santa Fe and the interior with the Caribbean coast.  As an internal economy gave way to an external export boom in coffee in the second part of the nineteenth century, Colombia’s territorial axis began to shift from the eastern mountain range and Lake Maracaibo to the Magdalena River, until all of the regions required access to this major artery.  In late nineteenth century the only stable and successful export product, coffee, changed the territorial balance in the highlands in favor of the central range mountains of Antioqueno colonization and against the eastern range mountains, the region dominated by Bogota.  The country described by Ancizar was a cachaco land connected to the lowlands of the Magdalena River.  [32]
        In making landfall on the Caribbean coast, Carneigie-Williams’ first impressions seemingly confirmed the European stereotypical view of Colombia as one of those hot and steamy tropical countries.  She immediately began describing the peoples of this hot and sensual region, including notes on exotic plants and unfamiliar animals.  She appears to have been particularly impressed with the fresh fruits, reporting that the bananas were “genuine –not the miserable fruits called by that name in the English markets, but luscious and delicious, like the richest melon, which melts as butter in one’s mouth.”[33]   In contrast to Ancizar, from the very beginning Carneigie-Williams took notice of the women if the land, whether it was the black women selling or carrying fruit, or the “Andalusian” and “Indian” women.  She noted that several lodging houses in the Caribbean islands were run by foreign women, and she took time to notice customs and ways of dressing that seemed alien to her. [34]   While Ancizar’s narrative was interested in observing “man” as a universal category and had a tendency to ignore women, Carneigie-Williams wrote from the point of view of a lady traveler, whose interests included men and women alike.
        Carneigie-Williams presents herself as a Victorian woman coming from the most important empire of the nineteenth century.  She travels with a young women companion, and she hires two more in Bogota: Ana María and Faustina.  She mentions several times in her narrative that her husband brings her flowers.  She notices nuances of dresses, such as the violet-dyed dresses invariably worn by the native women who lived along the Magdalena River.  In Honda, the last riverside port before the traveler began the assent up to the Bogotá highlands, she described the red, blue, pink and lilac skirts preferred by the women of the lowlands, which she later contrasted to the Bogotanas’ preference for black or dark clothes.  She also noted that men sporting white, wide-brimmed Panama hats, wearing ruanas (ponchos) of the same color, and carrying machetes.  She is also more sensitive to things often ignored in the travel accounts of men.  For example, she is shocked by the way that children in the Caribbean were allowed to roam the streets at will, and without anyone to watch over or discipline them. [35]
        Carneigie-Williams made note of the variety of women she encountered in her travels.  In her trips through the Bogotá hinterlands she wrote of strong peasant women carrying loads equal to the burden of half a mule.  When describing the industrial methods of extracting salt, she noticed that the mine of Zipaquira that images of the Virgin Mother abounded.  Although she did not accompany her husband on his travels into the steamy lowlands where his mining business was located—this stage of the trip being considered either too dangerous or simply not suitable for ladies—she gleaned from his own notes that in Guamo, Tolima, “women are reported outnumbering the men and the most bigoted.”[36]
        As a proper English lady, Carnegie-Williams was intimately acquainted with the parties and other social gatherings and activities organized by the urban elite of Bogotá.  She herself organized a party, but feared that her guests might be bored since they didn’t smoke cigarettes or play whist.  She was invited to several European-style balls where she reported the cavaliers and ladies danced in the style of her grandmother, comparable to Parisian gatherings.  Of course, she recognized that Bogotá was not Paris, and resembled more closely a simple Spanish town with its red-tiled roofs, narrow, uneven streets, and wonderfully dressed, (if somewhat dirty), inhabitants.  She also described how costly (in time and money) it was to furnish the house, as most of the items she required had to be imported from Europe, and had to follow the same route she took up the Magdalena River, and up the mountains to Bogatá by pack mule. [37]
        Since her husband’s occupation in the mines often left her to her own devices, our narrator spent a lot of time looking out the window, the television of the time.  She was conscious of her own pastime, even recording a local saying:

“Música, miel y la ventana
no son buenas en la mañana.”

which she translates as “Music, sweetmeats, and standing at the window are not the proper occupations for the morning.”[38]
Although Carneigie-Williams’s narrative was clearly written from a woman’s perspective, she scrupulously supplied the more mundane data and precise descriptions typical of men’s travel relations.  She not only dated the events she described, but as might be expected from a seafaring people, she also provided the reader with changes in geographical coordinates at sea, etc.  For example, on August 5 she wrote that the ship had “accomplish[ed] 288 miles by noon, and found (them)selves in lat. 44.49 N., and long 19.07 W.”  She also provided detailed lists of the names of plants she discovered, as in her list of “pelargoniums, geraniums, chrysanthemums, cowslips, roses and lobelias.” [39]  However, only occasionally does she describe rigorous changes in altitude as much as changes in latitude, an unfortunate omission given that the climate of Colombia and other “tropical” countries was effected more by altitude rather than latitude.
        At any rate, Carneigie-Williams discovered a complex and diverse nature in the tropics.  She clearly distinguished between the hotlands of the Magdalena river, the piedmont, the lowlands, the rainforest, and the cool highlands.  She noticed another important tropical nuance: “real tropical forest is much cooler, than the Magdalena river.” [40]  In the piedmont it was common to see people of mixed race, half Spanish and half Indian.  In addition, her narrative provided evidence that neither the gentleman nor Indian hunter had developed a conservationist ethic.  She once described, for example, how her “husband had his rifle ready, and fired at some of the dozens of alligators which were lying along the banks on the sands with their mouths wide open.”  And in passing, she wrote of the “Pretty, yellow and brown birds with orange tails” that her husband sometimes shot, as did the Indians armed with blowguns. [41]   Carnegie-Williams’ own compassion for animals was reserved more for domestic animals—an Anglo-Saxon attitude seemingly not replicated in Latin cultures.  She lamented, for example, that not only the women, but also “the poor donkeys are so laden as to leave only the head and feet visible, and not contented with being thus burdened, the negro drivers are always seated upon the top.” [42]
        For her, the Bogotá highlands proved to be the most pleasant surprise of her trip as the fields of barley, strawberries, pine and willow trees, and cooler weather reminded her of her beloved England.  Despite the different foods and customs, she was comforted by the strong European influence.  She happily attended horse races.  When she went to Choachi and crossed the “paramo,” it felt like October in England with its almost cold air.  She noted the presence of eucalyptus, brought from Australia for the first time in 1865, and she found many English weeds.  Urban nature was lovely in Bogotá’s patios, “full of flowers all around the corridor,...with trees ferns forget-me-nots, roses, sweet peas, iris, lilies, violets, papayas, and a tree full of long yellow flowers.  Almost every house in Bogota contains a similar patio,” she wrote. [43]
        As a proper Victorian lady, Carnegie-Williams presided over the activities of the household, and as part of her domestic duties she regularly compiled a list of household expenses.  Among other items, her list included prices for her daily bread, pigeons, fish, milk, a pair of irons, a packet of cornstarch, plum cake, chocolate for the servants, and the water carrier’s bill.  It also includes sugar, rice, potatoes, carrots, plantains, flour, butter, a sweeping brush, artichokes, a boy for sweeping, washing, ducks, cauliflower, lettuce, beets, celery, onions, oranges, small turnips, brandy, chickens, and 12 pesos to keep a horse in a livery stable for a month. [44]   The ducks are a noteworthy item, since today they are unavailable in Bogotá.  Also curious are the artichokes, which few Colombians eat.  She also provided information about the menu, printed in English and Spanish, of the Royal Mail Steam-packet Company on which she traveled.  Although Carneigie-Williams’ travelogue doted on much information “suited more for Ladies” (and perhaps present-day social and gender historians), she also recognized the importance of noting her husband’s comments about the Colombian elite, the few rich families that monopolized huge tracts of land by buying or illegally appropriating lands under the umbrella of mid-century liberal reforms.[45]
        While women’s travel literature brings a new perspective to and different information than normally found in men’s travel accounts, I would argue that it is not an entirely autonomous point of view.  Carnegie-Williams’ insights supplement, rather than subvert the dominant Victorian culture of which she is an accepting participant.  It is less significant that she travels with his husband, or that she cannot accompany him to the mines, or even that she follows some of the standard formats of the travelogue.  Rather, the key is that she knows her place in society and works within that structured universe: a proper Victorian lady living the adventures permitted to her by a male-dominated culture.  While we do not find evidence in her account of nineteenth-century feminists battling against patriarchal strictures, there is much in her travel account that is of interest to modern scholars.  Symbolically, Carnegie-Williams’ account can be read as a metaphor of the liberal government’s vision for the transformation of Colombia in the nineteenth-century.  The “free trade” liberal government envisioned a new nation enriched as its products flowed from the eastern and central highlands, down the fluvial artery of the Magdalena River, to the Caribbean coast, and the international market.  Carnegie bore witness to the remaking of Columbian society based on the exploitation of a hybrid ecosystem—lowlands and highlands—and the nascent nations early attempts to connect to the “civilized” world.  Ironically, even the names of the ships she travels are a metaphor of her origin and her destination.  She came to Colombia on the Don, recalling the stratified Spanish society based on honor.  But she traveled back in a ship called the Victoria.  Although some of the features of “honorable” society were still alive, liberal policies, ideas of progress, and a new view on civilization were undermining Colombia’s Spanish legacies.
        Some scholars have maintained that travel accounts penned by women are by nature more subjective than the supposedly objective accounts written by men.  These words correlate with another duality: internal/external.  While it is true that Rosa Carneigie-Williams’ personal voice and viewpoint permeates her narrative, one might also argue that Manuel Ancizar’s more explicitly “objective” travelogue is also very subjective.  Incontrast to Carneigie-Williams, Ancizar described a nature that derived as much from his imagination as from reality.  Carneigie-Williams was impressed with the variety of fruits, the pretty sunsets, and the torrential rains, but she was describing a tangible reality, not inventing a country as was Ancizar.
        Both Ancizar and Carneigie Williams traveled through the populous and civilized Colombian heartland in the nineteenth century.  Our next Colombian travelers, one liberal, the other conservative, were to journey into the heart of the Colombian wilderness.  Because their travels took place in the periphery, territorial rather than land concerns predominated.  In the highlands and its hot hinterlands, liberals pushed for the privatization of land to fuel the export economy.  As a result of their policies, haciendas were built up at the expense of Indian communal lands, and expropriated church properties.  In the remote provinces, however, attempting to buy land was tantamount to like plowing the sea, as one of the local “Llaneros” told the Bogotanos in Santiago Pérez’s party.  As it was not yet possible to commodify the land in this virtual internal colony, the wealthy urban elite first sought to appropriate the territory and to tap the natural resources of these relatively unknown regions.  But with the exception of rubber extraction, there was no concerted effort made to more aggressively exploit these regions until the oil companies began to set up shop in the 1920s, and the cocaine industry took root in the late twentieth century.
For Columbia’s elite families, more than half the country was accounted a “no-man’s land.”  In reality, this meant that the Llanos (plains) remained in the hands of cowboys, the Orinoquia River Valley still belonged to the indigenous peoples, the Pacific coast was held by free blacks and indigenous peoples, and the biogeographic Choco to the intrepid rubber “barons” and wilderness entrepreneurs, and the Amazon to the Indians.   The state exercised no power in these remote territories, and they were Colombian only because they were designated as such on maps.  The travel accounts of both Santiago Pérez Triana and Rafael Reyes consciously sought to bring attention to the economic potential of these regions.  Meanwhile, they remained sanctuaries where a fugitive might escape the long arm of the law, as in the case of the liberal Santiago Pérez Triana, or else reaffirm one’s masculinity by conquering anew these wild and untamed regions as in the case of the conservative Rafael Reyes.

        Santiago Pérez Triana was a prominent liberal leader, the son of the president of the republic, and the former director of the Liberal Party.  When he was accused of corruption at the beginning of the 1890s by the conservative government then in power, he decided to flee the country.  He traveled from Bogotá to the east, descending to the Llanos, an immense prairie shared by Colombia and Venezuela as part of the Orinoco basin, a land of wild cattle, and independent cowboys proud of the part they played in backing Simon Bolivar and achieving victory in the Independence wars.
        By navigating rivers, avoiding Colombian authorities, and connecting with the Orinoco River at the Colombian-Venezuelan border, Santiago Perez believed he would reach the Atlantic and find safe passage to Europe.  Educated in London and Paris, Pérez Triana was equally at ease in the Old and New World.   He was a great admirer of European civilization, and as a liberal reformer he advocated those policies that he believed would reshape Colombia in its image.
        A brief incident that occurred in the course of his travels provides the basic elements of how Columbian liberals in general, and Pérez Triana’s specifically viewed the “remote” lands of their own country.  The expedition employed an expert hunter and guide, and when the expedition descended from the Andes and arrived at the Llanos, the hunter began shooting at the seemingly inexhaustible flocks of birds.  In less than half an hour he had returned to the base camp with sixteen, and was only dissuaded from killing some more by the argument that those he had already brought in would suffice to feed the entire group for three day.  Arguing that they ought to conserve ammunition and adopt a military-style organization, Pérez and his comrades decided to draw up a sort of decree, which read as follows:

                The Chiefs of the Expedition:
                Taking into consideration that man is the owner and the master of Creation, by divine law, and
                consequently he is authorized to use the natural elements and all creatures, according to his needs,
                his conveniences and his legitimate pleasures;
                Second, considering that the distinctive sign of that right, in its possibilities of enforcement are
                based on force, and that force is the supreme regulating factor between men and between men
                and other creatures, both in the animal and the vegetable kingdom. And because force is also the
                supreme regulative factor that ties the inert matter by action and reaction.
                Third, because the former evident truths put responsibilities over us.
                Fourth, because of all these reasons it is necessary to regulate the proper use of our rights based
                on the law of force and pain that connects all the beings of Creation. Having in mind these
                conditions we should behave inside the limits of strict need, without trespassing, and avoiding abuses
                or cruelty, we decree. [46]

        Interestingly, there is nothing of the “social compact” or any other liberal foundation for authority to be found in the decree.  Rather, it resembles more an imperial or absolutist document with its appeal to a divinity, and may, in fact have been designed as a satire of that source and type of authority.   Pérez Triana’s writings curiously combine authoritarian rhetoric, positivist and scientific thought, natural law, and appeals to both God and Reason, and even the utilitarian appeal to pleasure and pain!  The text of the decree itself is also interesting:

                Article first: We declare inviolable the life of fish, amphibians, terrestrial animals, and birds, when
                they are not necessary for our sustenance. Ferocious beasts, reptiles, damning and poisonous vermin
                are excepted and they can be exterminated under the law of conservation.
                Article second: We declare under our protection the aboriginal savages inhabitants of these regions,
                who are not obliged to work against their will or without payment, treating them under the principle
                of equity.
                Article third: In the case that it is necessary to kill more animals or to compel natives to work by force,
                under the judgement of the Chiefs of the Expedition, they can order whatever they consider convenient,
                without explanations or need to justify their conduct because they are invested with supreme virtue and
                science, providentially supported by force, which is its best evidence, and what they do is going to be well done.
                Proclaimed in Santa Rosa del Tua, in January the second of 1894. [47]

        As Pérez Triana later acknowledged, the decree was not meant to be taken seriously; rather it was itself a parody of the hypocritical proclamations made by legalistic Spanish conquistadors.  Their hunter-guide, however, failed to see the humor, complaining that it was much too similar to the proclamations penned by petty bureaucratic tyrants who hid their true imperialistic motives under philanthropic protestations.  Satire or not, the document does give some indication of how the urban Colombian elite viewed these territories as unconquered wilderness in serious need of taming before it would yield up the requisite benefits to the civilized regions of the country.  The decree whimsically recognized the “inviolability” of wild animals (excepting dangerous beasts), but arbitrarily reserved the right to revoke that protective status at any time and without cause or explanation!  In fact, the immutable natural “law of conservation” was invoked to justify exterminating at will any beast that could be considered a threat to human life.  The modern “preservationist” idea of protecting wild nature was never seriously considered.  The decree also paid lip-service to the long Spanish tradition of declaring the Indians to be under their “protection” and free from the imposition of forced labor.  Here too, however, the right is no sooner recognized before it is revoked.  In the context of imperial policy towards the Americas, “protection,” of course implied a subordinate and tributary status for the Indians.  While the decree is a brilliant caricature of the imperial proclamations like the Requirement designed to satisfy the royal conscience, but do nothing to curb the actual abuse of power.
        With the exception of a single female Indian healer, women are conspicuously absent from Pérez Triana’s narrative, and the audience is instead introduced to the virile culture of the cowboys who rode the plains and prairie lands of the Oriental Llanos.  If women were virtually invisible in his account, the all-too-often invisible Indians of the lowlands also made a brief appearance.  They were ignored, in part, because they had little contact with the Spaniards and Creoles, but also because state policies concerned with the country’s “wastelands” barely recognized their existence.  For example, decree 645 of 1900 stated in its first part that:

                The president of the Republic, considering:
                First: that the desert regions of the Republic, place of settlement of the Indigenous population,
                non civilized, have remained unproductive for the Nation ...

Because the “non-civilized” peoples of the Orinoco and the Amazon watersheds did not contribute to the Republic, they were not considered citizens and their lands could be expropriated for the national interest.  Pérez Triana included in his narration a plan for the joint exploitation of wood, peltry, and other natural “commodities” from these regions by the Colombian and the Venezuelan governments. [48]
        Pérez Triana’s narrative was written partly to persuade and partly to entertain.  It was, in fact, so successful as a literary piece that it was translated into French before the end of the century.  Some of his stories reflect a typical Bogotano sense of humor.  Pérez Triana’s bon-vivant character, and liberal, progressive agenda, and Eurocentric world view can be contrasted with that of an even more influential character of the turn of the century: General Rafael Reyes.  Reyes represented the victorious conservatives who defeated the liberal project.  The general and his conservative colleagues were not interested in importing French culture; rather, they aimed at recovering an honorable Hispanic heritage and looked to emulate their northern neighbor.

        Rafael Reyes was born in the Cuche vereda of Santa Rosa de Viterbo, in the highlands of Boyaca.  Before becoming president and dictator of Colombia between 1904 and 1909, Rafael Reyes made his mark as an explorer, an entrepreneur, a military man, and as the leader of the Conservative Party.  Reyes and his brothers organized an expedition that left from the southern department of Narino on the border with Ecuador, crossed the Amazon region from the Putumayo River bordering Colombia and Peru, and ending up at the Amazonian delta.  He claimed to have discovered a new route across the South American continent from the west to the east. [49]
        Reyes was no ordinary explorer but thought of himself as a modern-day explorer and conquistador.  He subscribed to the notion that humanity was divided between savagery, barbarism, and civilization.  He and his conservative cohorts, however, were not so anti-liberal as to reject the idea of progress, scientific achievement, and Western technology.  Rather, they differed from the liberals only in their view that Roman Catholicism and Hispanic culture provided an equally valid path down the road to civilization.[50]   Reyes’ stories of his explorations and travels abound with expressions of masculine achievement and manliness, and racial and cultural superiority.  In many ways, his own incredible stories parallel those of his North American counterpart, Teddy Roosevelt.  Ironically enough, while the two men shared similar machismo, racist, and imperialistic ideas, it was the Roosevelt’s naval intervention that ultimately cost General Reyes Panama, when that country opted for independence from Colombia in 1903.  U.S. forces in Panama’s ports refused to let the general disembark to control the subversive movement, and Colombia lost control of the Panama region.
        Even as Reyes proved impotent to forcibly prevent Panamanian secession, he and his conservative cohorts insisted that Colombian civilization was a vital and virile and progressive as that of the United States.  Sharing a negative view of the “darker” race’s prospects for civilization, Reyes attempted to disassociate Colombia from those denigrated peoples of the Philippines and Hawaii.  According to General Reyes, Colombians could proudly boast of having already “furnished abundant proof of their virility and progressive spirit.”[51]   During his days as an intrepid explorer, Reyes traversed “virgin forests, inhabited by vipers and wild beasts, crossing lands of savages, both hospitable and cannibals” [52]   In fact, his brother Nestor was killed by the cannibals of Putumayo, and Reyes memorialized his loss by portraying him as a martyr in the cause of knowledge and progress in America. [53]   Reyes believed that it was the responsibility of the “civilizing” forces to impose peace upon the “savages.”  Towards that goal, Reyes worked with Brazilian authorities to bring an end to the intertribal warfare of the Indians who traded war prisoners for alcohol, tobacco, mirrors, and other trinkets.
        Reyes was not merely interested in exploring for its own sake.  He was interested in assessing the mineral and agricultural resources in the Amazon.  He reiterated the elite conviction that the Amazon was one of the most fertile regions in the world, though it would require a manly and civilized state to build the railroads and open up the lands to exploitation.  Once this was accomplished, however, he was confident that “the rivers will give up their latent wealth and the treasure embedded in the virgin soil will become available to the pick of the miner.”[54]   In the meantime, however, extractive activities such as rubber tapping were the only means by which the wealthy could exploit these “internal colonies.”
        In assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the various regions of Colombia, Reyes believed that the department of Antioquia was perhaps the most prosperous.  Antioqueños, he noted, exhibited the fine characteristics of the Spaniards of Extremadura and Andalusia, with “rose-white complexions and robust health.”[55]   It was the capital city of Bogotá, however, that the salutary culture and customs of Spain endured, particularly with regard to the veneration of women, “who are the models of purity and virtue.”[56]
        In fact, while paying a visit to Cardinal Farley in New York, Reyes boasted that “Colombian women are pious and are devoted to the practice of the highest domestic virtues.”  When asked if the law of divorce existed in Colombia, he answered proudly that it “does not and never will exist, owing to its repugnance to our idea of national decorum and to our faith in the fidelity and pious qualities of our women, who, as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters, are not only the sovereigns of the home but educate the man from his cradle to his maturity” and adding that “even when a man marries, his moral education is continued by his wife, and at her death by her daughters.” [57]   Whatever might be said about Reyes’ views of womanhood, he certainly cannot be accused of ignoring them or of claiming that they did not occupy an important role in his civilized, patriarchal society.  If women virtually fail to appear in Ancizar’s and Pérez’s travel accounts, Reyes promoted them to a prominent pedestal in his own narrative as exemplars of the virginal national decorum.  The Cardinal was pleased by General Reyes answer, expressing his relief that “in young America [Colombia] the modern ideas of materialism which destroy the virtue of the Christian homes and render the woman morally inferior have not yet implanted” and further argued that “such ideas lower women from the sovereign pedestal over the home and lead to a barbaric condition of affairs.” [58]   In tribute to the women in his life, Reyes named a place along the Putumayo River, La Sofia, after his wife.[59]
        Always eager to champion his own country’s culture and heritage, Reyes maintained that the differences between Colombia and the Anglo-Saxon nations were not substantial.  Himself a racist, Reyes asserted that Colombia was for the most part racially clean.  Moreover, he argued, the blessings of Catholicism had seen to it that the once savage Indians had already yielded to the requirements of modern society.  In Latin American countries, he argued, Catholicism, the main difference with Anglo-Saxon culture, had effected this civilizing transformation. [60]
        Following the failure of the liberals to affect the transform the country along “progressive” lines, Conservative leaders restored to the Catholic Church their traditional powers over public, social and family affairs.  In the context of the expansion of the hacienda and the erosion of dowry arrangement during the nineteenth century, women became even more subordinated by patriarchal domination. [61]   Their influence became ever more constricted to the domestic sphere as chauvinistic conservatives resurrected the most regressive aspects of their Hispanic heritage.  If their manliness was threatened by their impotence to defend their own frontiers, at least these men could take comfort in seeing their virtuous wives and virginal daughters elevated to the lofty protective heights of an imaginary pedestal.
        Reyes was not a simple minded conservative.  He was an admirer of American progress.  Rafael Reyes and Theodore Roosevelt shared many ideas about civilization and manliness.  They did, however, differ on one important point.  According to one historian, “Roosevelt wrote that the Monroe Doctrine was intended to apply, not to civilized ‘commonwealths’, like Canada, Argentina, Brazil or Chile (all with white large populations), but only to uncivilized ‘tropical states’ which (like unmanly men) were too ‘impotent’ to do their own duty or defend their own independence.” [62]   The Colombian elite at the beginning of the twentieth century was powerless to contain the greed of the geopolitical interest of U.S. government.  Reyes with all his pride and his virile expeditions was not able to defend Panama.  He was not even able to land his troops to smash the independence movement.  Yet, despite some understandable bitterness, he could not help but admire the United States because of their accomplishments in constructing the Panama Canal.  The Americans had, after all, accomplished his own goal of affecting the “conquest of the tropical regions by the means of sanitation” to make these lands habitable and useful to humanity. [63]   However, that is the story of our next lady’s travels in Panama.

        This section analyzes two women’s travel books written by the daughters of two imperial and virile powers, Great Britain and the United States of America, less than a decade after Panama achieved independence.  Travelers from various parts of the world were traveling to the former Colombian region, attracted by a colossal feat of engineering surpassing even that of the Suez Canal.  Englishwoman Edith A. Browne visited Panama in 1912, excited by the prospect of witnessing the construction of the most impressive work yet undertaken by men.  After rehashing Panama’s history from Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s invasion at the beginning of the sixteenth century, she began to describe her own impressions of the isthmus.  Before arriving, her only idea of what she might find in the tropical country was the well-known Panama hat, and she was disappointed to discover that they were actually made in Ecuador, and only traded in Panama.  Mrs. Brown’s American counterpart, Mary L. McCarty, in contrast, wasted no ink or paper on the region’s Spanish history but immediately set about describing its present incarnation and transformation.   Her interests include the exotic character of the jungle vegetation, the steamy tropical climate, the fires, and of course the coming together of so many diverse peoples to work on the canal.  Unlike her Victorian predecessor in Bogotá, McCarty is surprised to find the bananas and apples to be identical to the ones she can find in the markets of her native New York.
        While the two accounts share some common topics, they are marked by differences in their views of the historical undertaking they came to see; the British woman being less impressed by the canal than the American.  Mrs. Browne, for example, quoted the engineers as saying that “Yes, nothing bigger has ever been undertaken, but several of the smaller jobs that have been accomplished are more wonderful engineering feats.”  And when she saw the locks, her associations were rather negative, comparing it to the “Titanic and in the Tower of Babel.” [64]   The American woman, on the other hand, was proud of a work that made the Seven Wonders of the World pale by comparison, and stressed the “the impression of massiveness, immensity and enduredness.” [65]   She had trouble believing that the canal was the work of mere mortal men, but thought it rather resembled the “stupendous work of giants,” and that they would prove to be as “eternal as the hills.” [66]
        Minor differences aside, both women subscribed to the popular myth that “civilization” and “the tropics” were incompatible, and both lauded the work of the American entrepreneurs, engineers, and the sanitizing agents of “civilization” in the struggle to tame and transform the canal region.  Mrs. Browne, for example, noted while that the Canal Zone belonged to the United States, the rest of the region, (with its constant rain, humidity, swamps, and millions of blood-thirsty mosquitoes), rightly belonged to Panama.  As a result, she was particularly impressed by the measures taken by the Americans to “exterminate the mosquitos, swamps, pools and suchlike breeding-places beloved by mosquitos.” [67]   As a direct result of the work of the sanitation engineers, she wrote, the canal had been reclaimed and “renewed as one of the healthiest district of the world.” [68]   Mrs. MacCarthy, on the other hand, complained about having to wake up insufferably early to take the train to cross the Isthmus, as though the railroad company were “trying to inculcate the ‘early to bed and early to rise’ maxim.”  That was something she could not understand, given that “such energy was hardly according to the climate.” [69]   However, the fact that the railroad was American was for her “a good explanation and even a good reason to forgive them.” [70]
        The two women did not confine their observations to the canal and the sanitation work of the American engineers, however.  Mrs. MacCarthy took note of the social environment as well, noting the sharp contrasts between the few splendid houses of the rich Panamanians and the humble huts of the native peoples, pausing to wonder why the houses did not have detached residences as in the northern climates.  McCarthy also provided tips to future women travelers on the most suitable attire to wear to the tropics.  She also related her surprise that, in contrast to her own country, there were not the same rigid distinctions by race and color. [71]    Mrs. Brown took the time to describe the colorful clothes worn by the women of the tropics.  She also included beautiful drawings and photographs of scenes of the market, picturesque streets, humid landscapes, maps, and engineering works. [72]
        It should be noted that neither Brown nor McCarthy were Victorian ladies but rather “modern” bourgeois tourists.  Although married, Mrs. Brown, account reads as if she were traveling on her own.  Her narrative opens with the advice of a former boyfriend, and her husband never appears in print.  Mrs. McCarthy, the American, traveled with her husband for pleasure but was unconcerned by archaic Victorian standards of lady-like behavior.  Apparently well-to-do, she traveled with her husband for the pleasure of the experience and made it her goal to enjoy herself thoroughly.  She certainly would not have shared General Reyes’s view of women as the denizens of womanly virtue and sovereigns of the domestic sphere.  For a woman of her means, such household chores and domestic drudgery was best delegated to other of less bountiful means of support.  By the dawn of the twentieth century, wealthy women from the more “developed” countries began to enjoy the privilege of traveling with their husbands throughout the world.  While it might would have been unsafe to have visited the canal zone during the French phase of construction, new measures of “sanitizing” the tropics by the Americans made it possible for “civilized” tourists to enter the jungle.
        As Gail Bederman has argued in her Manliness and Civilization, ideas concerning race, gender roles, and civilization became entangled in the imperial visions and ambitions of the elite classes in the early twentieth century.  The wives of wealthy American and British entrepreneurs shared the assumptions of the societies in which they were raised.  Such views were not limited, however, to the European and North American “mover and shakers” like American President Teddy Roosevelt whose machismo “civilizing” mission made the Panama Canal possible.  The elite power brokers of Colombia also entertained machismo, racist, and imperialistic notions of “civility.”  President Reyes, for example, defended the honor of his country by claiming that their Hispanic heritage at the expense of other contributing cultures, by maintaining that Catholicism had already affected the civilization of the savage races, and by expressing his confidence that further emigration from Europe would continue to assist in the transformation of Colombia as it had in Argentina.  Though impotent to prevent the loss of Panama, Reyes proved man enough to recognize both that the cartographic constriction of Colombia added a sense f realism to the country’s ambitious borders, and that the construction of the canal was an achievement that the entire civilized world could take pride in.

        Two or three decades after Reyes’s and Triana’s travel books were printed for a small, selected public, José Eustasio Rivera published a novel describing the adventures of a couple of Bogotanos who escaped from parental authority and journeyed to the wild lands of the eastern Llanos and the Amazonian rainforests. [73]   Rivera’s novel popularized new ideas about these remote lands for the country’s literate urban population.  His literary Llanos and tropical jungles were places where rough and rugged cowboys, mixed-blood nomads fought over untamed women.  In his novel, the rainforest was metaphorically both the wife of silence and mother of solitude who offered a green prison for a home.  The tropical forest was a wilderness, and a womanly one at that.
        Just as Colombian President Reyes and American President Teddy Roosevelt shared a common set of assumptions and attitudes concerning the masculine nature of culture, the most popular literary “best-sellers” in both countries exploited the jungle motif.  There, however, the similarities end.  Edgar Rice Borroughs’ Tarzan achieved phenomenal popularity in North America in the second decade of the twentieth century by introducing a superior white, specimen of invincible manhood, who, though raised in the jungle, had the raw strength and manly courage to impose “civility” and without becoming effeminized in the process.  The “white ape,” Tarzan was an especially appealing character to a nation that had just recently closed its internal frontiers, only to be consumed by the hysteria of “race suicide” and fear of the “effeminizing” effects of excessive civilization. [74]
        The Colombian counterpart of Tarzan was Arturo Cova, the main character created by Rivera.  Unlike Borroughs’ heroic Tarzan, however, Rivera’s urban-raised highlander turns anti-hero in the end, seduced and captured by the irresistible charm of jungle savagery.  While North Americans dreamed of the jungle they had never experienced, urban Colombians had no reason to idealize--(and good cause to fear)--the jungle that had never really retreated from their own backyard.  An excess of pristine nature and savagery frightened Colombians, who lived to close to the jungle and the “primitive” man idealized by Roosevelt.  Most urban Colombians would have preferred to forget that the Orinoco and the Amazon were also Colombian territories before the Peruvian army forcibly occupied Leticia in 1932 and “national honor” forced them to defend the territorial integrity of their country.
         Surprised by the lack of women travel books in Colombia, and trying to uncover a female counterpart to Rivera, I decided to complete my search by looking for women traveling along the Orinoco River from Venezuela.  I found that in the late 1920s, Lady Dorothy Mills rediscovered native populations that survived the end of the export boom of the wild lowland regions in the borderlands between Venezuela and Colombia.  These remote regions were becoming again what they used to be in the nineteenth century, before liberals like Triana decided to “protect,” and conservatives like Reyes, to “civilize” them.
 When Mrs. Carneigie-Williams made the journey to Bogotá, she took great pains to behave as a proper Victorian wife ought to, ever cognizant of her position in society as a lady even as she endured the hardships of climbing the rugged mountains of Colombia astride a mule.  In contrast, the British and American sightseers, Mrs. Brown and Mrs. McCarthy traveled in relative comfort by steamship and train, and behaved like modern tourists.  Our last traveler, Dorothy Mills was neither accompanying her husband or sightseeing.  She traveled on her own as an amateur ethnographer anthropologist out of a desire to see and to learn.  Already an experienced, she undertook the latter trip moved by the desire to visit the Orinoco, reputedly a “land of strong men, and mysterious waterways.” [75]   Although she traveled without a male escort, she was not averse to making the acquaintance of a fellow gentleman traveler.  Her itinerary caused a small sensation in Caracas and other Venezuelan cities, where it was commonly held: “Who goes to the Orinoco comes back mad or dead.” [76]
        Mills’ solo travels in the late 1920s exemplify the gains some women were making in establishing their independence.  Previously, the few women’s travel books that were published were often regarded as frivolous amusements and were almost exclusively marketed to a female public that had little opportunity to travel except vicariously.  In the 1930s, travel opportunities provided women with the possibility of building “a room of their own.”  If their travel accounts had once been ridiculed as subjective personal accounts, historians have since found them to be as rich a source of information as the supposedly more “objective” reports set down by men.  By Mills’s time, women were producing objective accounts in a new subjective way.  They became less wives, and more women. [77]
        While this essay has focused on Columbia’s environmental history, it has also tried to illuminate the transformation of gender-nature-culture relations between 1850 and 1920.  While one notices a range of differences in the point of view and interests of male and female travelers, in the period under review, both sexes appear to have shares similar views as regards the concept of “civilization.”  “Savage” and “barbarous” peoples were closely associated with nature at a time when “civilized” peoples thought of them all as obstacles and challenges to be faced and overcome a sort of masculine rite of passage into “civility.”  Ironically, in the twilight of the twentieth century, a curious reversal had occurred, as the progressive development paradigm led to the ecological crisis of the 1970s.  While the earlier  “progressive” and “civilizing” missions saw it as their duty to cut down jungle forests and to tame wild nature, most moderns have begun to re-embrace a romantic vision of nature and to jump on the bandwagon calling for the preservation of “wilderness” reserves and the culture of the native peoples.
        While the world has just begun to realize the global scope of the new environmental crisis, on the local level, Colombians are still struggling to build a state, resolve land title and territorial issues even as war rages unchecked in the country’s few remaining wild regions.  Contradictions posed by poverty, the geopolitics of drug dealing, and the growing strength of guerrilla forces have necessarily pushed “rainforest rescue” and other environmental concerns to the backburner.  There is, perhaps, at least one point on which Colombians have achieved consensus: that man’s arrogant and aggressive attitude towards nature, as exemplified in the era of “Tarzan and the Virgins,” has passed.

Notes

[1] In the case of Inca culture the dual gender structure of masculine sun and feminine moon bespoke of a complementary rather than hierarchical relationship as explained by Irene Silverblatt in her Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).
[2] Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in Woman, Culture and Society.  Ed. by Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lanphere.  (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).
[3] Some feminist perspectives would reject those kinds of comparisons for their negative psychic and social consequences on women.  See Sharon Tiffany and Kathleen Adams, The Wild Woman: An Inquiry into the Anthropology of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Shenkman Publishing Company, 1985).  Nevertheless, both men and women have used this metaphor.  See, for example the travel book of Jane Dolinger, The Jungle is a Woman (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1955).
[4] Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[5] For an excellent summary of “eco-feminism” see Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology. The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992), 183-210.
[6] An important exception is Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions. Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
[7] The following basic criteria lay behind this research: first, the basic duality masculine/feminine and its corollaries (male/female, man/woman) are culturally construed and constructed.  This does not mean that this distinction does not have biological roots and complex relationships.  Second, this duality is dynamic.  So far as masculine and feminine roles are not fixed, they are changed by transformations of time and space: they are relatively flexible.  Third, what is interesting nowadays is not to study schematic and fixed oppositions, but crossing identities, exchanges, role ruptures, acceptance and resistance to imposed cultural roles.
[8] See Victor Uribe-Uran, Honorable Lives: Lawyers, Families and Politics in Colombia, 1780-1850 (Pittsburg, Pa.: University of Pittsburg Press, 2000).
[9] German Palacio, “Territorio: Notas Teóricas y Aproximación a la Historia de Colombia,” unpublished manuscript, 1998.  Olivier Bernard y Fabio Zambrano, Cuidad y Territorio. El proceso de poblamiento en Colombia (Bogotá: Academia de Historia de Bogotá-Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 1993).
[10] Hans-Joachim Konig, En el camino hacia la Nación. Nacionalismo en el proceso de formación del estado y la nación de la Nueva Granada, 1750-1856 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1994).
[11] Eloy Valenzuela, Primer Diario de la Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reino de Granada 2nd. Ed.  (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Hispánica, 1983); Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
 [12] Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 111-200.
 [13] Hermann Schumacher, Codazzi: Un forjador de la cultura (Bogotá: Ecopetrol, 1988).
 [14] Important accounts on travel writing are Barbara Brothers and Julia Gergits, ed., British Travel Writers, 1940-1977 (Detroit: Gail Group, 1999); James Duncan and Derek Gregory, Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 1999); Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl Fish, ed., A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Andrea Loselle, History Double: Cultural Tourism in the Twentieth Century French Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
 [15] Marion Tinling, Women into the Unknown: A Sourcebook on Women Explorers and Travelers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); Billie Melman, Women’s Orients. English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Rebecca Stefoff, Women of the World: Women Travelers and Explorers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Bonnie Frederick and Susan McLeod, ed., Women and the Journey: The Female Travel Experience (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1993); June Hahner, ed., Women Through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1998); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1991); Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (New York: The Guilford Press, 1994); Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York: The Guilford Press, 1994.
 [16] Hahner, ed., Women Through Women’s Eyes, xi-xxvi.  In 1993, to commemorate the “Fifth Centenary” of the “encounter” of the Old and the New World, the Colombian Central Bank (Banco de la República) and Colcultura (the Colombian state cultural agency) published at least 12 travelers’ books.
 [17] The Bogotá Academy of History, in collaboration with a private company, published what remains to date as perhaps the only female traveler’s account of Colombia in the nineteenth century.  See Alfredo Iriarte, “Prologo”, in Un ano en los Andes, o, Las aventuras de una lady in Bogota.  Tercer Mundo Editories. (Bogotá: Academia de Historia de Bogota, 1990), 9.  Panama, at that time part of Colombia, attracted U.S. capital to build the railroad in the 1850s, and the French later invested in the De Lessep enterprise to build the Panama Canal.  The French sources as well require further exploration.  While I have been able to locate a British woman’s report to her government from Panama at the end of the nineteenth century, her trip to Panama was part of a longer journey from China to Peru, and unfortunately the Panama portion of her account is too brief to afford much detail.  See Mrs. Howard Vincent, China to Peru: A Journey through South America (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1894).
 [18] Manuel Ancizar, Peregrinacion de Alpha.  2 vols.  (Bogotá: Banco Popular, 1970).
 [19] The Bogotá example appears to bear out historian Alfred Croby’s thesis that environmental preconditions (ie., a temperate climate) was critical to the creation of “neo-Europes” around the world.  See his Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
 [20] A European traveler mentioned this process in 1857.  See Isaac H. Holton, New Granada: Twenty Months in the Andes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 108-109.
 [21] Ancizar, Peregrinacion de Alpha, v. 1.,  26.
 [22] Ibid., 28.
 [23] Ibid., 33-34.
 [24] Ibid., 242, 244, 245.
 [25] Ibid., 67.
 [26] For romanticism as reversion, see M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: The Norton Library, 1971).
 [27] Ancizar, Peregrinacion de Alpha, v. 1., 35.
 [28] Ibid., 49.
 [29] Ibid., 53-54.
 [30] Ibid., 119.
 [31] Rosa Carnegie-Williams, A Year in the Andes, or, A Lady’s Adventure in Bogota (London: London Literary Society, 1882).
 [32] Cachaco is the generic label that people from the Caribbean use to refer to the people of the Andes.
 [33] Carneigie-Williams, A Year in the Andes, 23.
 [34] Ibid., 22-37.
 [35] Ibid., 220, 22, 44, 57.
 [36] Ibid., 190-193, 245, 124-125.
 [37] Ibid., 107-109, 105.
 [38] Ibid., 145.
 [39] Ibid., 72.
 [40] Ibid., 163.
 [42] Ibid., 43, 55.
 [42] Ibid., 12.
 [43] Ibid., 142, 110-111, 206, 170.
 [44] Ibid., 153.
 [45] Ibid., 127.
 [46] Santiago Pérez Triana, De Bogotá al Atlántico (Bogotá: Banco de la República-Colcultura, 1995, 22-26.
 [47] Ibid., 25.
 [48] Ibid., 185-194.
 [49] See Mario Perico Perez Ramirez, Reyes: de cauchero a dictador (Tunja: U. Pedagogica y Tecnologica de Colombia, 1974); Eduardo Lemaitre, Rafael Reyes: Biograpfia de un gran colombiano.  3rd. Ed.  (Bogotá: Espiral, 1967).
 [50] Reyes, The Two Americas (New York: Frederick Stokes Company, 1914), 314.
 [51] Ibid., xxiv, xxvi.
 [53] Ibid., 44-45.
 [53] Ibid., 48, 56.
 [54] Ibid., 296. Reyes was not aware of just how unsuitable Amazonian soils were for agriculture.
 [55] Ibid., 284-285.
 [56] Ibid.
 [57] Ibid., 287.
 [58] Ibid.
 [59] Ibid., 45.
 [60] Ibid., xxx, 294.
 [61] Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, 210.
 [62] Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 197.
 [63] Ibid., 60.
 [64] Browne, Peeps at Many Lands (Panama: Adam and Charles Black, 1913),  85.
 [65] McCarty, Glimpses of Panama, and the Canal (Kansas City: Tiernan-Dart Printing Company, 1913), 102.
 [66] Ibid., 59.
 [67] Browne, Peeps at Many Lands, 52.
 [68] Ibid., 53.
 [69] Ibid., 65.
 [70] Ibid., 66.
 [71] McCarty, Glimpses of Panama, 77.
 [72] Browne, Peeps at Many Lands, 40.
 [73] José Eustasio Rivera, La Voragine (Mexico: Porrúa, 1972).  Rivera was the most widely read Colombian writer of the twentieth century before superceded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
 [74] Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.
 [75] Dorothy Mills, The Country of the Orinoco (London: Hitchinson and Co., 1931), 89, 10.
 [76] Ibid., 127.
 [77] I am not aware of any Colombian woman’s travel account during this period. Perhaps the more famous Colombian literate women during the second part of the nineteenth century was the prolific writer Soledad Acosta de Samper.  Unfortunately, this author limited herself to writing moralistic tracts in support of the time-honored role of women in upholding traditional family values.