Hakluyt Society publications
Discussions by authors and independent reviews of books published by the Hakluyt Society and distributed to Society members
‘A Walk Across Africa’: The Nile Source Problem
When, in 1860, the Royal Geographical Society decided to send Speke and Grant to search for the source of the world’s longest river, the Nile, they were asking the two men to settle not only a series of arguments and disputed information which had arisen during the 1850s, but also arguments and speculations which had interested the learned world for over two thousand years or more. The immediate problem was that the RGS, founded in 1830, had become a powerful almost quasi-official institution keen to garner accurate geographical information but also perhaps to use that information in the service of especially British overseas interests. A knowledge base would be provided [...]
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Introducing the Hakluyt Society Edition of Grant’s Walk across Africa
The latest Hakluyt Society publication, 'A Walk Across Africa: J.A. Grant's Account of the Nile Expedition of 1860-1863', edited by Roy Bridges, has now been distributed to members. In a series of blog posts, Professor Bridges, a past president of the Society and expert of African history, shines his light on the new volume. In this first post he tells about his own 60-year engagement with the Speke and Grant Nile Expedition which eventually led to his remarkable and beautifully-illustrated Hakluyt Society edition. I first became acquainted with the story of the Speke and Grant Nile Expedition of 1860-63 when I began research on the history of the Expedition’s sponsor, the [...]
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Hakluyt & Oxford: Essays and Exhibitions Marking the Quatercentenary of the Death of Richard Hakluyt in 1616, edited by Anthony Payne
The booklet of 112 pages with eight coloured illustrations includes three essays based on lectures given at the various events, the catalogue notes of the two exhibitions and the conference programme, as follows: Hakluyt, Aristotle and Oxford Anthony Payne Instruments and Practical Mathematics in the Commonwealth of Richard Hakluyt Jim Bennett Richard Hakluyt: From Oxford to the Moon William Poole Richard Hakluyt and Geography in Oxford 1550–1650 An Exhibition at Christ Church Hakluyt: The World in a Book An Exhibition at the Bodleian Richard Hakluyt and the Renaissance Discovery of the World Conference Programme Anthony Payne is a past Vice-President of the Hakluyt Society, and with Daniel Carey and Claire [...]
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2017 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize winner: Neither “Middle Ground” nor “Native Ground”: Reading the Life of Goggey, an Aboriginal Man on the Fringes of Early Colonial Sydney
The Hakluyt Society is pleased to announce that its 2017 Essay Prize has been awarded to Annemarie McLaren, a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University, Canberra. As runner-up in this year's competition, an Honourable Mention is awarded to Cameron B. Strang (University of Nevada, Reno, USA), for his essay: "Coacoochee's Borderlands. A Native American Explorer in Nineteenth-Century North America". Annemarie McLaren will be awarded a cash prize of £750 for her winning essay. Both the winner and runner-up will also receive one-year free membership of the Society. In this blog post, McLaren reflects upon the research that went into her prize-winning essay, "Neither 'Middle Ground' nor 'Native Ground': Reading the life of Goggey, [...]
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The Armada of the Strait: James P.R. Lyell and the Relación of Pedro de Rada
By Anthony Payne A source of great satisfaction for an antiquarian bookseller is to discover a rarity and to see a major work of scholarship result from its acquisition by a research library. One such instance for me was the Hakluyt Society’s publication in December 2016 of The Struggle for the South Atlantic: The Armada of the Strait, 1581–1584, splendidly translated and edited by Carla Rahn Phillips from the Spanish manuscript Relación of Pedro de Rada, now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California (MS HM 59416). The Huntington purchased this from the antiquarian booksellers Bernard Quaritch Ltd. in 1999, when I was one of the company’s directors. We had [...]
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The Armada of the Strait, 1581-1584: Disastrous beginnings of an ill-fated enterprise
Tuesday, the 3rd of October [1581], the eve of San Francisco, when we had sailed about 35 leagues from San Lucar, there began to be such strong wind from the south and south-west, with much shifting of the cargo, and things looked bad, so that it was indispensable that the armada take down its sails and heave to, until Friday, the 6th of the aforesaid, when the weather had such force that the galeaza capitana had to jettison some things, which was done. And the weather worsened so much on this day that eight navios from the armada could not be seen. And the next day, Saturday the 7th, we [...]
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Personal conflict in the Armada of the Strait: Sarmiento versus Flores
An interview with Professor Carla Rahn Phillips, editor and translator of the Hakluyt Society's 2016 volume The Struggle for the South Atlantic: The Armada of the Strait, 1581-84. To start, could you say something about the personal conflict at the heart of the Armada of the Strait? CRP: Like any large enterprise, the Armada of the Strait was bound to have a range of personalities and a certain amount of disagreement and friction among its participants. Nonetheless, one ongoing clash all but defined the Armada of the Strait: the enmity between Pedro Sarmiento, governor-designate of the colony to be planted at the Strait, and Don Diego Flores de Valdés, captain general [...]
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2016 Hakluyt Society Volume: The Struggle for the South Atlantic: The Armada of the Strait, 1581-84
In this first of three blog posts, Professor Phillips introduces The Struggle for the South Atlantic . The Armada of the Strait under Don Diego Flores de Valdés in 1581–4 came at a crucial juncture in global politics. Philip II of Spain had assumed the crown of Portugal and its overseas empire, and Francis Drake’s daring peacetime raids had challenged the dominance of Spain and Portugal in the Americas. Drake’s attacks had demonstrated the vulnerability of both Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and intelligence reports indicated that other English adventurers hoped to replicate Drake’s successful melding of trade and plunder. It was clear to Philip and his councillors that something had to [...]
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Abraham Lawse (c.1559-1613) – Case Study of a Tudor-Stuart Shipmaster
When I was working on my PhD dissertation on the social history of Elizabethan seamen in the 1990s, I spent a great deal of time combing through High Court of the Admiralty cases, parish records, wills, and whatever else might yield information about the personal and professional lives of late Tudor seafarers. The highest-ranking men in the English maritime community were the most likely to leave a paper trail in the historical records, affording researchers the opportunity to “meet” them at various junctures of their lives: shipmaster Abraham Lawse (c. 1559-1613) was one such man. I first encountered Lawse in parish records from 1584, when he was a young man getting married [...]
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How to read Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598-1600)?
MF: For me, one of the great challenges of working on Hakluyt’s collection has been finding productive ways to apply the tools of textual analysis – “literary criticism” – to a work that is not at all a “literary” text (or if it is, only in scattered moments), and which has both many discrete authors and one fairly taciturn editor. My Annual Lecture gave an overview of some lines of approach; I’ll describe a few of them here. Principal Navigations (1598-1600) [Hakluyt Society Extra Series, Nos. 1-12] is organized by geography: each of Hakluyt’s three volumes groups together voyages to particular parts of the globe. Mary Fuller (MIT), Experiments in Reading Hakluyt's Principal [...]
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