MERRION, AMBROSE (1766-1839), traveller and prose writer, born in the Hudson (q.v.) province, employed first in mercantile correspondence and afterwards as a travelling clerk in Louisiana (q.v.). He entered that country after the Purchase of 1804 and returned to it repeatedly. He had neither a public commission of exploration nor a claim to have discovered the roads by which his business took him. The distinction deserves recording, since the later popularity of his books has sometimes supplied him with both.
His River Days (1814) follows the progress of a cargo through successive delays. Weather, a damaged boat, a disputed quantity, and the want of a person authorized to sign a receipt give the chapters their occasions. The journey is therefore measured twice: by the distance which ought to have been travelled and by the time which has actually been spent. Merrion's characteristic sentence begins with the first measurement and ends with the second. The reader learns to distrust an easy arrival before the traveller has ceased to expect one.
The book's chief pleasure is its choice of particulars. A boatman mends a thing which the merchant intended to replace; a clerk has kept his papers dry by surrendering his coat; a promised meal is described most fully while it is still promised. Merrion does not make all practical men wise or all visitors foolish. He understands the vanity of experience, and gives the man who knows the river opportunities to be wrong about the persons upon it. His humour is often an alteration of scale: an immense country pauses while two men determine which of them possesses the proper piece of string.
The Inland Road (1826) is less continuously agreeable and more considerable. Its journeys leave the principal watercourse for tributaries, crossings, and roads whose apparent connexion upon paper does not secure a passage upon the ground. The prose grows longer and more qualified. Directions received at the last lodging must be corrected by a traveller met at the next, and the same place acquires several descriptions, each intelligible to the person who gave it. These passages are among our best accounts of the difference between a route and a map.
Merrion's limitations are most visible where he supposes himself merely practical. The native guide enters as the answer to a traveller's difficulty; the account seldom follows him after that difficulty has been removed. A country can consequently seem new to the reader at the very moment when the writer is depending upon someone else's old knowledge of it. The omission belongs to the construction of the books, not to a defect which can be repaired by praising the traveller's occasional generosity.
He died in 1839. The book trade (q.v.) has commonly placed him among the writers of adventure, with illustrations more hazardous than his pages. His real subject is the business of getting somewhere, and the continual revision of the traveller's estimate of what the undertaking requires. For the political consequences of those journeys see WESTERN EXPANSION (q.v.). Merrion himself is best read at the speed of his impediments. (H. M.)