Creolizing America

In the late eighteenth century, maritime travel writing about exploration and discovery was superseded by travel accounts of interior exploration and scientific travel.¹ This kind of travel writing was very much part of the new knowledge production project of natural history, initiated most prominently by Carl von Linné and Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon. In his Systema Naturae (The System of Nature), first published in 1735, the Swedish naturalist Linné “laid out a classificatory system designed to categorize all plant forms of the planet” (Pratt 1992, 15). The first three books of Buffon’s Natural History of the Earth (Histoire naturelle)