The age of revolutions produced or propelled at least three distinctive modes of witnessing. Perhaps most well-known is that we might term epistolary tourism: the witnessing of writers, typically of radical bent, such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Helen Maria Williams, who published Letters from revolution’s side. Those well-known literary accounts contrast to what have become known as slave narratives, but which we might helpfully conceptualize in their late eighteenth-century form as testimonies to slavery’s suffering: the publication, in the 1780s and 1790s, of accounts by former slaves seeking to press upon the era’s proclamations about liberty and equality. Finally, and typically of less egalitarian or radical bent, was military reportage: the declaredly “eyewitness” event-based narratives composed by army officers who served the interests of ancien regime empire as much as independence. Each of these traditions, I argue, had a distinctive geography across the late eighteenth century revolutions and between New and Old Worlds. And each dwelled on what has been a hallmark of witnessing across time: a focus and a struggle with pain, suffering and death.