Travel Writing on the Date Line: Claiming Lost Days in the Late Nineteenth Century

In “Travel Writing on the Date Line”, Kevin Riordan addresses one of the unique features of the Pacific Ocean, namely the International Date Line. Beginning in the age of exploration, and increasingly through the age of steam, the date line became a necessary fiction for making the world’s local time zones cohere as a global system. But there still never has been any formal agreement about, or definitive placement of, this essential line. Instead, Riordan argues, the line attained its widespread currency through the transnational print culture of the nineteenth century. While individual travel writers most often described their confusion regarding this phenomenon, collectively these accounts engendered a working consensus on the date line for a newly global reading public.