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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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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