Hakluyt Society publications
Discussions by authors and independent reviews of books published by the Hakluyt Society and distributed to Society members
Taking Newton On Tour. The Grand Tour Travel Diary Of Martin Folkes (1690–1754)
Volume 45 in the Hakluyt Society Third Series and the second volume sent to members in 2025 is Taking Newton On Tour. The Grand Tour Travel Diary Of Martin Folkes (1690–1754), edited by Anna Marie Roos. This a critical edition of an exceptional example of the ‘Scientific Grand Tour’ taken by Martin Folkes. Martin Folkes (1690-1754) was Newton’s protégé, antiquary, mathematician, and the only simultaneous president of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. In 1733-5, he went on Grand Tour as a scientific ambassador for the Royal Society, demonstrating Newtonian optics to Italian virtuosi. He also measured ancient and Renaissance buildings to understand past architectural engineering and design. […]
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A Scientific Voyage in the Southern Hemisphere and Around the World
Volume 44 in the Hakluyt Society Third Series and the first volume distributed to members during 2025 is A Scientific Voyage in the Southern Hemisphere and Around the World Executed Successively on Board the King’s Corvette Uranie and His Majesty’s Corvette La Physicienne During the Years 1817,2828, 1819, and 1820: Narrative Journal of Joseph-Paul Gaimard Commissioned Surgeon of the Marine Royal. Edited by Sylvie Brassard and John Milsom. The aims of the expedition of the French corvette Uranie, which left Toulon for a planned global circumnavigation in September 1817, were scientific. Gravity and magnetic fields were to be measured, natural history specimens were to be collected and primitive societies were […]
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New Edition: John Martin’s “An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands”
by Nigel Statham In 1963, when I was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, I accompanied Danish archaeologist Dr Jens Poulsen to Tonga. Dr Poulsen was the first archaeologist to use modern archaeological excavation methods to investigate Tongan antiquity. Tonga was well off the beaten track in those days, still sometimes referred to by Captain James Cook’s name for the archipelago, the Friendly Islands. There was still no regular aerial transport, and most visitors travelled on cargo ships. When I returned to Australia, my father marked the occasion with the gift of a book, John Martin’s Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands …from the extensive communications of Mr William Mariner, several [...]
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Book launch “Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World”
Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World explores the multiple links between trade, empire, exploration, and global information transfer during the early modern period. By charting how the leaders, members, employees, and supporters of different trading companies gathered, processed, employed, protected, and divulged intelligence about foreign lands, peoples, and markets, the book throws new light on the internal uses of information by corporate actors and the ways they engaged with, relied on, and supplied various external publics. This ranged from using secret knowledge to beat competitors, to shaping debates about empire, and to forcing Europeans to reassess their understandings of specific environments due to contacts with non-European [...]
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Review: The Voyages and Manifesto of William Fergusson
by Lionel Knight This volume will join more than forty travel accounts focused wholly or in part on South Asia which the Hakluyt Society has published over the years. Almost all were written before formal western control, though edited in the age of high imperialism. By contrast, this work is consciously set by its author in the world of the European Enlightenment. Derek Elliott has edited it with notes and a critical introduction which explore the training and career of apothecary surgeons and contextualize the Indian Ocean trading world into which they sailed. There are eight maps, four colour plates and copious other illustrations. The reader is taken on four [...]
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Review: The Javanese Travels of Purwalelana
By Lionel Knight The Javanese Travels of Purwalelana. A Nobleman’s Account of His Journeys across the Island of Java 1860–1875. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Judith E. Bosnak and Frans X. Koot. Pp. Xii, 272. Published by Routledge for the Hakluyt Society, London, 2020. Reviewed by Lionel Knight in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 32, no. 1 (2022): 263–65 The Hakluyt Society’s list of published historic travel accounts is strongly international but authors from outside Europe have been few, and Java was last visited in 1944 with Armando Cortesão’s edited translation of Tomé Pires’ Suma Oriental. Nearly all the Hakluyt Society volumes date from before the [...]
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English Travellers to Venice by Michael G. Brennan
By Michael G Brennan, Professor of Renaissance Studies at the School of English, University of Leeds. English Travellers to Venice: 1450-1600 originally developed from accounts of travellers to Venice in my two earlier Hakluyt Society books: The Travel Diary of Robert Bargrave Levant Merchant 1647-1656 (1999) and The Origins of the Grand Tour. The Travels of Robert Montagu, Lord Mandeville, 1649-1651, William Hammond, 1655-1658, and Banaster Maynard, 1660-1663 (2004). As I was editing these two volumes, I became aware that there were many other, earlier accounts of English travellers to Venice which either had never been edited or were not readily available to modern readers. Hence, I began to research [...]
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Surprises of Travel through Java in the Nineteenth Century
Judith E. Bosnak and Frans X Koot (2020), The Javanese Travels of Purwalelana. A Nobleman’s Account of his Journeys Across the Island of Java (1860-1875) When traveller Candranegara, alias Purwalelana, woke up he was startled. The guardhouse where he had just spent the night had been completely covered with a fine silken cloth and, moreover, a lavish breakfast awaited him - comprising coffee, sticky rice balls, eggs and sliced seasoned deer meat. As it turned out the village head had organized this special treat when he learned - late at night - that a nobleman had arrived near to his village, seeking refuge in a simple hut. So, replete with food and drink the traveller continued his journey through Java, at that time part of the Dutch East Indies in the Malay Archipelago. The Javanese Travels of Purwalelana (henceforth The Travels) is a remarkable travelogue in many [...]
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The Voyages and Manifesto of William Fergusson
Edited by Derek Elliott, The voyages and manifesto of William Fergusson, a surgeon of the East India Company 1731-1739. Unlike the subjects of most Hakluyt volumes, William Fergusson was not an adventurer, explorer, or a member of a famous expedition. Rather, he was an apprentice apothecary-surgeon sailing the well-plied routes of the East India Company's growing trans-national commercial network. The volume reproduces – with annotations and an introduction – the twenty-two diaries that Fergusson composed toward the end of his life in 1767, which recount four voyages he made as a young man calling at ports in the British Isles, southern Africa, Yemen, India, Malaya, China, and St Helena in [...]
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‘New Caledonia’ and mythmaking in the Darien Scheme
My project in the Spencer Collection at the University of Glasgow was largely concerned with primary print and manuscript materials relating to the ‘Darien Scheme’. The Darien Scheme was orchestrated by the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (1695-1707) in the late seventeenth-century and involved the attempted establishment of a Scottish settlement and trade emporium dubbed ‘New Caledonia’ upon the Isthmus of Darien in Central America (1698-1700). While the effort proved abortive, the Scheme and its collapse has long been the focus of political and economic historians for its assumed role as a catalyst for the Union of Scotland and England in 1706/7. More recent scholarship on [...]
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