Hakluyt Society publications
Discussions by authors and independent reviews of books published by the Hakluyt Society and distributed to Society members
Author’s View: The ‘Joys’ of editing the Banks Iceland and North Atlantic papers
Editing the Banks Iceland correspondence was a joy – now that it is finished and I look back on the experience. It all began last century when I was at the London School of Economics working on my doctoral thesis on Anglo-Icelandic relations 1800–1820. I was in the Botany Library of the Natural History Museum looking at the Banks Iceland correspondence preserved there. The curator said I must meet Harold B. Carter. Harold was an Australian research scientist who had become interested in Banks – after all Banks is very well-known as "the Father of Australia"; he adorned the $5 bill at the time - and before leaving Sydney for [...]
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The Series Editor’s View: or, what Hakluyt Society Series Editors do
When and how did you become Hakluyt Society Series Editor? I first became a series editor in 2008, after about a year's apprenticeship as an assistant editor, in which I took on the role of preparing the report for Council on progress with volumes. I already had some experience as an editor of some of the catalogues published by the National Maritime Museum, where I was a curator. Since then I have edited the Society's annual lectures and worked closely with volume editors in preparing travel accounts for publication. I focus on the 18th to 20th centuries, while my fellow series editor, Professor Joyce Lorimer, concentrates on earlier periods. So far [...]
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Sir Joseph Banks, Iceland and the North Atlantic 1772-1820
Sir Joseph Banks, Iceland and the North Atlantic 1772-1820: Journals, Letters and Documents, edited by Professor Anna Agnarsdóttir. After the successful Endeavour voyage [Hakluyt Society Extra Series 34], Sir Joseph Banks was due to sail on James Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas. Unhappy with the accommodation, Banks withdrew and sailed with his twenty-strong party to Iceland, thus leading the first British scientific expedition to this remote island in 1772. Thus began Banks’s association with Iceland. This volume contains the Iceland journals of Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) – including an account of his ascent of the volcano Hekla – and his servant James Roberts. Secondly, all extant documents regarding [...]
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Australia Circumnavigated: The Story of the HMS Investigator
By Professor Kenneth Morgan HMS Investigator, the ship supplied to Flinders for his Australian circumnavigation, was built in 1795 by Henry Rudd as a collier at Monkwearmouth, near Sunderland (county Durham). Originally named the Fram, this vessel of 334 tons was 100 feet long, about 29 feet on the beam, with a draught of around 14 feet and 19 feet depth of hold. She was a three-masted, square-sterned ship built to ply the route from the north-eastern coalfields around East Anglia to London. The Navy Board purchased the ship at Deptford in April 1798 and renamed her the Xenophon. The vessel was then converted to an armed sloop. This mainly [...]
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A Short Life of Matthew Flinders (1774-1814)
By Professor Kenneth Morgan Born into a medical family, with no seafaring connections, Matthew Flinders decided while still a teenager that he wanted to pursue a naval career that focused on maritime exploration. He had read Robinson Crusoe as a child, and his imagination was stimulated by a tale of adventure in a far-distant island. As a young naval recruit, he had a varied time sailing with Bligh in the Providence on his second breadfruit voyage to the Pacific and Atlantic oceans (1791-3) and serving in HMS Bellerophon (1793-4) in the naval war against revolutionary France, culminating in the naval battle of the Glorious 1st June. Flinders made his name [...]
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Matthew Flinders and the Circumnavigation of Australia, 1801-1803
Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) was the first navigator to sail all the way around the Australian coastline, proving it to be a separate continent. He also compiled detailed charts of substantial parts of its shores and islands, at a level of accuracy which meant that they remained useful well into the nineteenth century. The Hakluyt Society’s edition in two volumes includes some photographic extracts from these charts, together with specially-drawn maps detailing the route of the voyage. The voyage had more than its fair share of both triumphs and tragedies, recounted in Flinders’s own words and carefully edited by Professor Kenneth Morgan of Brunel University, who explains unfamiliar nautical terms and [...]
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2015 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize winner: “Printing the Pacific”
By Katherine Parker I am grateful to have been chosen as an Honorable Mention in the Hakluyt Society’s Essay Prize Contest. As a student member and active participant, I think it vital that more early-career scholars join organizations such as the Hakluyt Society. New minds can bring fresh topics and methodologies, but younger colleagues also benefit from interaction with more seasoned scholars who can assess and direct their work. My own research, including the essay discussed here, owes a great debt to previous historians of exploration and encounter, and it is to them, especially Glyndwr Williams, that I credit my intellectual development. In the paper submitted to the Hakluyt Society, [...]
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The Cabot Project
By Dr Heather Dalton In compiling Diverse Voyages (1582), Richard Hakluyt was keen to establish the historical precedent that ‘we of England’ had only to reclaim North America rather than conquer it. However, finding texts that proved that these lands ‘of equitie and right appertaine vnto us’ was problematic and Hakluyt opened this book with a document related to a voyage from Bristol led by a Genoese navigator. This was ‘A latine copie of the letters patentes of King Henrie the Seuenth, graunted vnto Iohn Gabote and his three sonnes, Lewes, Sebastian, and Santius, for the discouering of newe and vnknowen landes’. [See: Hakluyt Society First Series, no. 7] Although [...]
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Saluting Captain Matthew Flinders
One aim of Capt. Barritt's journey was to draw together existing members of the Society. In Canberra, Dr Woods convened a happy gathering including Frank Wheatley and his wife Barbara who had travelled all the way from West Australia. After discussions with the President, the group viewed some of the library’s treasures, carefully chosen by Dr Woods for their relevance to the work of Matthew Flinders. Afterwards the members were joined by an enthusiastic audience for the lectures. The President Meets with Australian members The success of this launch event was matched by the experience of Captain Barritt and Professor Morgan in a special session in the Fridays at the [...]
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Regional Guides to books published by the Hakluyt Society
By Ray Howgego Now entering its 170th year and with around 335 volumes under its belt, the Hakluyt Society established long ago a reputation for publications of exceptional scholarship. Unlike many other societies of its genre which started life in Victorian London, the Society succeeded in retaining its identity into the 21st century and continues to thrive through the efforts of a small but dedicated team of officers and editors. Its volumes, often drawn from forgotten manuscripts languishing deep in the archives, frequently represent the only accessible source of information on the material they describe, and it is beyond doubt that our awareness of the history of travel and exploration [...]
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