Colonial landscapes were feared as wild before any monsters populated them

Evidence

Monsters also continued to appear abroad, often in colonial spaces that functioned simultaneously as sites of desire and repulsion, expressions of the European mindset of the time, a “proto-anthropology with racist and political overtones.” Exotic monsters, from the giant cannibals of Fiji to the croco-sapiens of Egypt, continued to populate the imaginations of tourists, explorers, and the even the most brilliant scientists. Unfamiliar landscapes inspired new monsters, a result of the European (and later, American) attitudes surrounding untamed places, places that were scary in and of themselves. “But forests and mountains—and with them deserts, jungles, even islands—need not to be populated to be fearsome. It was enough that these places were wild: that was the trigger to the terror.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 356

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the ‘fear without an object’ thread — terror preceded the monster, confirming the image-then-reality pattern the reader is tracing. — connects to: Before the nineteenth century, wilderness meant wasteland and evoking terror, not beauty — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 8; Colonial peoples were naturalised alongside their land as savage nature to be tamed — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 404
• QUESTION: The ‘wild places are fearsome in themselves’ idea — worth checking whether this is borrowed from a specific theorist of landscape and terror.