AustLit

'From the first emergence of geographical models which postulated a warm tropical zone between the two hemispheres, philosophers, theologians, and thinkers of all kinds have speculated on what might be found in the tropics and about the equator. When eventually mariners, navigators and explorers opened up this zone to naturalists and travelers, fantastic accounts and descriptions of the tropics proliferated. The area was described as both an Arcadian paradise where beautiful animals lived in harmony with human beings, and an infernal dystopia of monstrous beasts and polygamous savages and cannibals. In places the tropics could be a desert of barrenness and infertility or an expanse of featureless ocean, while elsewhere it was an aquarium of exotica or a fecund forest of immense biodiversity. For naturalists and scientists it became a vast laboratory in which modern geological, zoological and evolutionary theories were incubated. For imperialists and businessmen it was a cornucopia of precious metals, plantations, and profit.'