This volume represents the proceedings of a symposium held in 2011 on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia Felix, the Arabian Journey, which lasted from 1761 to 1767. Apart from new studies of the Danish expedition, the proceedings include analyses of other scholarly expeditions and voyages from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, placing the Danish expedition in a broad context of early scientific expeditions. This was a time when the coastlines of continents, except in the Pacific and the Polar regions, were reasonably well known. Yet scientific knowledge about natural history and detailed geography of the interior of the continents other than Europe, as well as scholarly understanding of foreign cultures, both ancient and contemporary, was still limited.
Increasing focus on land-based travels in the eighteenth century and onwards meant more and longer encounters with local populations. Most studies in this volume focus on expeditions that involved contacts between local people and travelling European scientists and scholars. Others examine the scholarly questions which the scientific expeditions and travellers were sent out to solve and how observations were brought back to Europe and communicated both to other scholars and to the general reading public.
The contrasts between the “gentleman travellers” or the authors of entertaining travelogues and the scholarly approach of the Danish expedition are also apparent in several accounts.
Together, the papers in these proceedings paint a varied picture of eighteenth and early nineteenth century scientific expeditions and scholarly travel. In the eighteenth century the considerate and careful approach of Niebuhr and Forsskål in their dealing with local people was new or at least not so common, and Niebuhr and Forsskål’s methods in acquiring local knowledge seem to mark a new departure for the study of foreign cultures and their interaction with nature.
A conclusion drawn by several of the papers in this symposium is that, in spite of careful preparations, elaborate apodemics and detailed instructions given to the travellers, many of the most surprising, innovating or lasting results of the expeditions were achieved either due to casual events or in cases where the travellers did not strictly follow the research plans outlined for them, but improvised and grasped unpredicted opportunities for research that offered themselves during the journey. Both careful planning and extensive flexibility have been major reasons for success in the early scientific expeditions and travels dealt with in this volume.