SOURCE: Rose, Sven-Erik. “The Funny Business of the Swedish East India Company: Gender and Imperial Joke-Work in Jacob Wallenberg's Travel Writing.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 2 (1999-2000): 217-32.

In the following essay, Rose examines the 1781 Swedish travel narrative My Son on the Galley by Jacob Wallenberg, arguing that the author's comic sexual descriptions are an attempt to deal with feelings regarding Sweden's colonial exploitation of China and the East Indies.

Colonial Comedy

“Incarcerated for almost eighteen months on a ship and continually surrounded by wearisome monotony, may I not be permitted to seek refreshment in literary games?”¹ During an eighteen-month voyage from Gothenburg, Sweden to Canton and back (1769-71), Jacob Wallenberg, chaplain aboard the Swedish East India Company ship Finland, entertained himself and his shipmates by composing Min son på galejan [My Son on the Galley].² First published in 1781, two and a half years after its author's death at the...