Hakluyt and Purchas (1613)
Purchas, Samuel (1577-1626). Purchas, His Pilgrimage [...]. London: Fetherstone, 1613.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, two men, Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, made a major contribution to Europe's knowledge of the New World.
Born around 1552, Richard Hakluyt became interested in the geography and history of the discoveries at a very early age. While studying at Westminster School and then at Christ Church, Oxford, he read avidly, as he wrote himself, "whatever printed or written discoveries and voyages I found extant, either in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, or English languages." After being ordained minister, he was appointed chaplain to the English ambassador to France in 1583.
Hakluyt profited from his stay in Paris, compiling information on French and Spanish voyages of discovery. In 1587 he published an English translation of the unpublished account of Goulaine de Laudonnière. He returned to England in 1588 and one year later published a first collection of travel journals: The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation. This work served as the basis of his better-known and more substantial work, published in three volumes from 1598 to 1600 under an almost identical title. His last publication, in 1609, was an English translation of a Portuguese version of Hernando de Soto's voyages and discoveries. Hakluyt died in 1616.
Born in 1557, Samuel Purchas, also an ordained minister, inherited part of the imposing collection of unpublished travel journals left by Hakluyt at his death. Purchas published a first collection of accounts in 1613 under the title Purchas His Pilgrimage, but his most important work appeared in 1625-1626 in four volumes: Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes. Being sequels to Principal Navigations, these volumes bring together close to 1200 different accounts of voyages in different regions of the world. Moreover, the original manuscripts of a number of these travel journals are now lost. Purchas died in 1626.
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