Explorers and Food Beyond Settlements

Abstract

Chapter Eight, the final chapter of section two ‘Food across the Colonial Frontier’, traces the development of the food provisioning practices of overland explorers as they moved inland. This chapter includes localized studies of the experiences of people trying to establish food and household security as explorers and early settlers traversed their estates bringing livestock and new ideas. As the frontier expanded, so too did the frontiers of taste for inhabitants and newcomers alike. The French continued their sea explorations but the British were pushing inland from their settlements dotted along coastal areas. French and British exploration parties crossed paths many times in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both the quality of food and quantity of food provisions that could be carried on explorations became a formative aspect of the success or failure of an expedition. Whether a party made it to a prearranged destination, whether there was sufficient food to enable the expedition to return safely to a settlement, or even the simple fact of the daily health and optimism of the members of a party was significantly shaped by food. This chapter examines the records about what explorers were eating as they moved out from settlements overland and along parts of the coast that were unfamiliar to them, thinking about what they carried, and what they were able to learn of edible endogenous foods. Of note across the historical record gathered for this chapter, there was very little information recorded by these expeditions about inhabitants or what they were eating, suggesting that by now, inhabitants and newcomers were moving around one another in separate and sometimes intersecting lives. It is also becoming less common for an exploration party to include ‘native guides’ to help source food. Many journal records indicate that, by now, explorers were becoming aware that inhabitants from one place were not knowledgeable about food and water resources, or the terrain, once they left their own estates. Some, such as Eyre, still included inhabitants in his explorer party but this became less common towards the latter part of the 1800s. It is also of note that by the mid to late 1800s, expedition parties of newcomers carried what they could and ate what endogenous foods had been found to be acceptable during the early explorer and settlement days. There was little evidence of experimentation or curiosity during this period. It is also important to consider that inhabitants were moving across their estates according to the seasonal availability of different food resources and, given the vast distances involved, it is possible that only a few clan or family groups happened to be in the same vicinity as the explorers as they passed across country. Certainly, by the time small settlements began to be built, and lands began to be cleared for agriculture and grazing, there was greater likelihood that the food and water resources of inhabitants would become depleted or destroyed. In the case of explorers, they were so few in number, generally disliked endogenous food except for particular items, and passed across country with much of their food carried with them that their impact on available food resources could be considered to be minimal.