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240 The Mediterranean of Louis XV
was that the traveller observe the latitudes and longitudes of
places visited. In addition to the apparatus described by Boyle,
Bernard recommends that measurements of temperature be
made with a portable thermometer. If phenomena could not be
quantified, sensory impressions were to be carefully recorded
without embellishment. The fundamental geographic and climactic
features of a region were to be established preliminary to
defining the character, rituals, and behaviour of any human
populations that might be encountered.
For Bernard, the Mediterranean, its islands and adjacent territories
represented a particularly complex terrain that offered
limitless potential for discovery. The remains of antiquity and
the customs of modern nations were both deemed worthy of
interest. Those travellers who had previously investigated
Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and the Levant were generally regarded
as ignorant and unreliable: comparisons of accounts made by
different travellers demonstrated the degree to which evidence
could be falsified. This was particularly true of illustrations,
which purported to represent truth but were often in fact fabrications.
He was perhaps thinking of the publications of Spon and
Wheler, notorious for their crude and inaccurate renderings of
ancient monuments. Bernard was wary of all information that
had not been verified or corroborated by several travellers: by
the medium of collections of voyages such as his Recueil and a
multiplicity of others published in Britain and France throughout
the eighteenth century, the reader was empowered to compare
observations made by different travellers in the same
territories and thereby to root out error and falsification.
A better means of verifying information collected by travellers
was to centralize the analysis of this material in state institutions.
Unlike the traveller-observer defined by the Royal
Society who was left entirely to his own devices, the activities
of traveller-observers connected to the French administration
were tied to a larger framework of state-sponsored research, and
their work fed directly into a number of on-going projects
coordinated by a variety of closely integrated Paris-based government
agencies. 14 The voyages of official French traveller-
14 N. Broc, La Géographie des philosophes: Géographes et voyageurs français
au XVIII e siècle (Paris, 1975), 16–25.