The empirical study of emotions in Spanish travelogues and reports requires cultural knowledge as well as the use of linguistic annotation and quantitative methods. We report on an interdisciplinary project in which we perform emotion annotation on a selection of texts spanning several centuries to analyze the differences across different time slices. We show that indeed the emotional connotation changes qualitatively and quantitatively. Next to this evaluation, we sketch strategies for future automation. This scalable reading approach combines quantitative with qualitative insights and identifies developments over time that call for deeper investigation.