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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Hakluyt Society Essay Prize – Judging Procedures for the 2024 Competition
2024 is the tenth year of the Essay Prize, which has a value of up to £1000. I am immensely privileged to have served as one of its judges every year since the competition was established in 2015 and have acted as Chair of the judging panel for the last three years. Each year the judges read exceptional scholarship, but prospective entrants may be surprised to learn that the number of essays submitted to the competition is actually quite modest. Sometimes we receive less than ten eligible entries, more regularly between ten and twenty, rarely more than twenty. This means the chances of success are higher than entrants might think, [...]
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Warburg Institute Online Maps & Society Lecture with Bertie Mandleblatt
Thursday 2 March 2023, at 5 pm UTC/GMT We are very pleased to announce that Hakluyt Society Council member, Bertie Mandleblatt, the George S. Parker II, 52 Curator of Maps and Prints, at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island will be the speaker for the online Maps and Society lecture, organized by the Warburg Institute, London. Bertie will speak on ‘Mapping Revolution, Mapping Slavery: the Vicomte de Rochambeau and Cartographic Dreams of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in the Caribbean’. These lectures focus on the history of maps and mapping worldwide, from earliest times to the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the social and cultural factors of the [...]
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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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Lecture: Mapping Revolution, Mapping Slavery
We are very pleased to report that Hakluyt Society Council member, Bertie Mandleblatt, the George S. Parker II, Curator of Maps and Prints, at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, was the speaker for the online Maps and Society lecture, organized by the Warburg Institute, London. Bertie spoke on ‘Mapping Revolution, Mapping Slavery: the Vicomte de Rochambeau and Cartographic Dreams of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in the Caribbean’. These lectures focus on the history of maps and mapping worldwide, from earliest times to the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the social and cultural factors of the maps’ context, production, and use. Many speakers are internationally well-known scholars [...]
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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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The Archive of the Hakluyt Society at the British Library
Mss Eur F594/1/3-4: Hakluyt Society Council Minutes, 1965-1987. We are delighted to announce that the archive of the Hakluyt Society is now catalogued as part of the India Office Private Papers and available to researchers at the British Library. The archive contains papers relating to the running of the Society, including signed Council Minutes, Committee papers, administrative records and financial papers, and correspondence and other papers generated by the work of the Society’s various Honorary Secretaries. Descriptions of the archive can be found via the British Library’s Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue, and researchers can consult material in their Asian and African Studies Reading Room. A special thank you to [...]
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Decolonising Travel Studies: Rethinking the Study of Travel Writing about Africa
by Kevin Molloy It was reaffirmed in the Hakluyt Society’s 2020 annual report that its main objective remains the research and editing of international travel records to educate, and make rare travel narratives accessible to, the ‘public’.[1] I say reaffirmed because this objective has guided the Society since 1847. Analysing how editors of the Society’s Main Series have achieved this objective reveals what the Society’s capacity to innovate its practices is.[2] In this blog I will analyse published accounts of travel in Africa to show how the Society has been innovative in developing its research practices and academic focuses, though in a mostly incremental way. The Society’s readership has typically [...]
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