Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth

Studies in the History of the Hakluyt Society, 1846–1996

R.C. Bridges, P.E.H. Hair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317162964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

A special volume of essays to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Society, with a full listing and index of Hakluyt Society publications 1847-1995. Containing: P.E.H. Hair, 'The Hakluyt Society: from Past to Future'; R.C. Bridges, 'William Desborough Cooley and the Foundation of the Hakluyt Society'; Tony Campbell, 'R.H. Major and the British Museum'; R.J. Bingle, 'Henry Yule: India and Cathay'; Ann Savours, 'Clements Markham: longest serving Officer, most prolific Editor'; C.F. Beckingham, 'William Foster and the Records of the India Office'; D.B. Quinn, 'R.A. Skelton of the Map Room'; Michael Strachan, 'Esmond S. de Beer: Scholar and Benefactor'; and R.C. Bridges and P.E.H. Hair, 'The Hakluyt Society and World History'.

Part I
Prolegomena

Foreword

The Hakluyt Society: from Past to Future

Foreword

The title of this volume is taken from a sentence in the ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ of Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589). Applied there to contemporary English overseas endeavour, the phrase is equally applicable to the past, present, and intended future action of the Hakluyt Society, in making available, in English, a global range of ‘Voyages and Travels’. It thus provides an appropriate title for a volume designed to commemorate one hundred and fifty years of that activity.

The shape of the volume is intended to encourage appreciation of the Society’s history and reflection on its meaning. We believe that the Society has been a notable element in British scholarly endeavour and a body which may claim some modest success in contributing to understanding of the modern world. In the first part of this volume we present an analysis of the editorial and publication work of the Society, which is, of course, its whole raison d’être. Part II consists of original biographical studies of four notable figures who established and led the Society in the nineteenth century. In Part III there are shorter and more personal studies of three men who, in different ways, perpetuated and developed the Society in the present century, their lives and careers described by distinguished living members of the Society who knew and worked with them. Part IV of the volume takes the form of an Epilogue. Here the editors point to the wide historical contexts within which the Society has operated and suggest the ways in which the activities of the Society have both reflected these contexts and exerted some influence on their development. The final part, although labelled ‘Appendices’, is an integral part of the volume, inasmuch as it comprises basic information about the progress of the Society, especially through a detailed listing of all the Society’s publications.

The biographical essays are limited to deceased figures. One absent figure is Eila Campbell, who died while this volume was in preparation. Her name appears on no title-page, yet her influence on the Society in recent decades was considerable - as an Honorary Secretary, as series editor for many volumes, and as a decisive voice in Council.

***

In the notes to the essays, Hakluyt Society publications are further identified by the numbers given in the Listing on pp. 248–302 below, e.g., HS 15, HS 2/93, HS Extra 34.

The illustrations are taken largely from past Hakluyt Society volumes and have been chosen to reflect something of the range both of published editions and of what has been considered appropriate illustrations. A number of the illustrations also relate to specific editorial work noted in the essays. A number of the illustrations also relate to specific editorial work notes in the essays. Portraits of three leading Victorian figures and of Sir William Foster appeared in the centenary volume (HS 2/93), and portraits of three more Victorian figures (with one repeated) can be found on p. 70. The generous supply of maps in past volumes (the ‘more important maps’ listed in the centenary volume) is here weakly represented. Being commonly of large size and in fold-out form, the maps do not lend themselves to suitable reproduction within the present format, regrettably.

We thank the Council of the Society for inviting us to edit this volume. We express our obligation to the contributors for their labours in preparing their essays and their patience and forbearance in accepting our editorial interventions. Our principle has been to keep the text of essays ‘readable’, while including in notes, even if lengthy, not only the necessary evidential references but also such material and argument relating to complex or marginal issues as can assist the scholar to assess the weight of generalisations proffered in the text. We express our gratitude to our Series Editor, Sarah Tyacke, and the Society’s design consultant, Stephen Easton, for their tactful guidance. Mrs Dorothy Middleton, the late Professor Eila Campbell and Dr W. F. Ryan were encouraging in the early stages of the project; and we thank the Royal Geographical Society and its then Director, Dr John Hemming, for the permission to use the Society’s archives granted to ourselves and other contributors. For preliminary advice on the issue of a commemorative volume we thank Mrs Fiona Easton; for the expert preparation on p. 141 Mrs Sandra Williams; and for much of the photographic work Mike Craig and the photographic service of the Queen Mother Library of the University of Aberdeen. We are grateful for the assistance in procuring illustrations of Mrs Ann Shirley, Tony Campbell, Richard Bingle, and Anthony Farrington; and for permission to use illustrations we thank the British Library, the Wellcome Institute Library, and the Royal Geographical Society, all of London. Finally, we acknowledge the support of the Library and the Department of History and Economic History of the University of Aberdeen, and the Library and the Department of History of the University of Liverpool.

R.C.B., P.E.H.H.

Erratum

Page 4, paragraph 2, should read as follows:

The illustrations are taken largely from past Hakluyt Society volumes and have been chosen to reflect something of the range both of published editions and of what has been considered appropriate illustration. A number of the illustrations also relate to specific editorial work noted in the essays. Portraits of three leading Victorian figures ...

The Hakluyt Society from Past to Future

P. E. H. Hair

MANDEVILLE’S TRAVELS First page of the Paris MS. (Bibliothèque Nationale, Nouvelles Acquisition Françaises 4515). Reproduced as the frontispiece of HS 2/102 of 1953.

The Hakluyt Society, which is established for the purpose of printing rare or unpublished Voyages and Travels, aims at opening by this means an easier access to the sources of a branch of knowledge, which yields to none in importance, and is superior to most in agreeable variety. The narratives of travellers and navigators make us acquainted with the earth, its inhabitants and productions; they exhibit the growth of intercourse among mankind, with its effects on civilization, and, while instructing, they at the same time awaken attention, by recounting the toils and adventures of those who first explored unknown and distant regions.

(From a statement of the aims of the Hakluyt Society, as intermittently included in the printed volumes 1849–1895.)¹

The 281 volumes produced by the Hakluyt Society in its Ordinary Series between 1847 and 1995 - the first 100 volumes in a First Series issued up to 1898, the remainder in a Second Series from 1899 onwards – represent, because of multi-volume works, some 220 separate editions. In addition, the Extra Series, published in the present century, comprises 44 volumes and one portfolio of charts, and represents a further 11 editions.² The very first publication was a reprint of a single seventeenth-century printed work in English, relating to an English venture, with exiguous scholarly apparatus.¹ The Society has progressively taken a wider view of its responsibilities.²

The history of HS editing

Mere reprints of early English works soon became uncommon, and almost all works contained fuller scholarly apparatus.³ Editions of single printed works have, however, continued to the present day, although from an early date mostly with ancillary documentation from manuscript sources: the second volume initiated this category of publication. Collections of material from a variety of sources of more or less equal value, printed and manuscript, began with the fourth volume and eventually became another significant category: the term ‘collections’ first appeared in a title in 1914. The most regularly occurring among the printed sources set alongside manuscript sources have been Hakluyt and his successor Purchas, followed by Ramusio, the Churchill collection, and the Calendars of State Papers, their accounts being thus augmented or in some instances corrected. Documents from manuscript sources (the definition necessary because early editions used the term ‘documents’ to include printed sources) increasingly became the major texts in editions. Editions in which the base work is a single hitherto unpublished manuscript began with one in 1866 and continued with others in 1882 and 1887–1889.¹ For long these formed a small proportion of editions but latterly have become common. Collections wholly or largely of previously unpublished archive documents (as distinct from a single manuscript) began with a 1914 edition by Zelia Nuttall and continued in the inter-wars editions of Irene Wright and the more recent editions of David Quinn, Kenneth Andrews, and others of the ‘Quinn school’.² In the nineteenth century editorial search for and discovery of hitherto unknown archive material was almost always limited to investigations in British repositories such as the British Museum, Public Record Office and India Office, any original material from foreign archives having been searched for and discovered by local scholars, albeit usually at the request of the HS editor. As late as 1932 a North American scholar asserted that British editors failed to undertake, personally, extensive searches in foreign archives.³

Certain features of editions began commendably early: the second volume had an original index, the third a map, and the fourth a translation of a transcribed foreign manuscript.⁴ Illustrations in various technical forms - some illustrations more decorative than relevantly informative - were soon occasionally inserted, and after about 1880 regularly inserted.¹ The size of editions expanded. The first two-volume edition appeared in 1851 and 1852; the third, two volumes issued both in 1866, achieved a bumper 947 pages.² Two-volume editions became common from the 1880s. A three-volume edition was published in 1887–1889, and another was issued in a single year, 1896; a number of such editions have followed since.³ A four-volume edition appeared 1875–1884, and two have been published in recent decades. Publication of a six-volume edition took from 1907 to 1936 to complete; a five-volume edition, begun by one editor in 1958, will probably be completed by a successor editor in 1997.⁴ In 1871, 1896, and several more times up to the 1940s members received over one thousand pages for a one-guinea subscription.⁵

Whereas Richard Hakluyt concentrated on assembling material relating to English ventures and hence largely in English, the Society from the start looked further afield - perhaps surprisingly. One of the Society’s earliest decisions was to select as the emblem on each of its volumes a logo of Magellan’s ship, the ‘Victoria’, presumably symbolising its intention of intellectual circumnavigation.¹ Its second volume commemorated a non-English voyager, Columbus (although this was possibly a gesture of invitation to anglophone North America); and over two-thirds of the First Series volumes related to foreign activities, Spanish ones being well to the fore, partly as a result of the editorial enthusiasm of Clements Markham. The present century has seen a slightly larger proportion of editions devoted to English ventures, helped by William Foster’s series of editions on individual East Indian voyages (and encouragement of others to work in this field), while the dominance of Spanish among the foreign-language sources deployed has been somewhat reduced, Portuguese texts gaining ground and Dutch, French and Latin sources becoming more common.¹ About one tenth of all editions include translations of sources in more than one language, a proportion that has not greatly increased in the present century. Modern editors tend to offer material from only two or three foreign languages and an 1857 edition which claimed sources in Latin, Persian, Russian and Italian represented a geographical spread of languages hardly again matched.² If this concern for foreign-language texts represents some divergence from Richard Hakluyt’s own concern, the Society has nevertheless paid tribute to the master, and made his texts very much more accessible, by being associated with reprints of Principal Navigations in 1903–1905 and of Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus in 1905–1907, by publishing an edition of Divers Voyages in 1850, by publishing facsimile reprints of Principall Navigations in 1965 and of the manuscript Western Planting in 1993, and by producing, as a guide to the texts, a Hakluyt Handbook in 1974.³

When Richard Hakluyt, recording English voyages, had to use foreign-language material he normally gave the reader an English translation, as well as the original or, more often, instead of it. The Society has followed suit by normally publishing texts only in English, foreign-language source...