The voyage of Captain John Narbrough to the Strait of Magellan and the South Sea in his Majesty’s Ship Sweepstakes 1669-1671
In May 1669 Captain John Narbrough was appointed to command HMS Sweepstakes for a voyage to the West Indies, Shortly thereafter an adventurer who has gone down in history as Don Carlos (he gave different versions of his name, nationality and accounts of his life to virtually everyone with whom he came in contact) submitted a proposal to King Charles II for a voyage to South America with an apparent view to establishing trading relation with the native inhabitants and stirring up a rebellion against the Spanish authorities. The King, having had this proposal investigated, agreed to sending a frigate with a pink in company on a voyage of discovery with [...]
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Messy Lives on the Upper Guinea Coast: The Church Missionary Society and its Representatives
When I first began to explore the correspondence of the various Church Missionary Society’s agents in Sierra Leone during the summer of 2011, I confess that I knew very little about them. I was primarily conducting research about how body marks and identity were connected, and was hoping to find evidence of drawn or described body marks such as tattoos and scarification. Missionary accounts seemed like a good place to begin, but as it happened, I never did find descriptions of scarification or tattoo. What I found were lives. And as I read further, researching the authors and working to reconstruct the trajectories of their pupils, I realized how fascinating, [...]
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Hakluyt Society Editorial Workshop: A Report by Captain Mike Barritt
Present-Day Toponymy To start, editors should refer to official publications produced by the relevant national authority or a dependable derived publication. In the maritime sphere charts and sailing directions are produced in hard and soft copy by many Hydrographic Offices. Details can be found online using a standard search engine. The Office of Coast Survey makes all charts of domestic US waters available for download online. This is exceptional. A useful online source, analogous to Google Maps and Earth, is the website of Navionics, where the Chart Viewer allows access to digital charting of most areas. The toponymy on this site will reflect usage of the contiguous state. The best source [...]
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Grant, the Nile Expedition and Colonisation
In the early twenty-first century, much popular and academic opinion tends to roundly condemn anything to do with Britain’s past activities in overseas regions as ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’. These activities are, by definition, reprehensible exploitation of non-Western peoples. It is not politically correct to write about the so-called exploiters. An explorer like Grant is clearly, it is supposed, part of the exploitation processes. His ‘false modesty’ and ‘false philanthropy’ must be exposed. Hence, to give only one example, what I believe was intended as a little joke to be played on Grant by his companion Speke, has been interpreted by post-colonial writers and commentators as an assertion of cultural superiority [...]
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‘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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Hakluyt Society Editorial Workshop, London, Friday 4 May 2018
The first one-day Hakluyt Society Editorial Workshop will take place on Friday 4 May at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. There will be a range of contributions from scholars who are or have been involved with Hakluyt Society published volumes, including substantial talks from Professor Michael Brennan, Dr Angela Byrne and Professor Joyce Lorimer. The aims of the workshop are to encourage interest in the academic editing of texts for publication and to offer practical support and advice to those engaged on editing projects. While the emphasis will be on the Society’s approach to text editing, the workshop will be of value to anyone involved with or [...]
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In memoriam: Dr Ian Jackson (1935-2017)
Dr Ian Jackson (1935-2017) on the Amazon river on his 82nd birthday. Brazil, 11 February 2017. Photo credit: Mrs Merlyn Jackson. Ian Jackson was born in Keighley, Yorkshire in 1935 and studied geography at London and McGill Universities. His career had an unusual range, as he worked for institutions as varied as the Canadian International Geophysical Year, the London School of Economics, the Government of Canada and the United Nations (serving in Geneva and in New York). In 1957-8 as a graduate research student he was part of Operation Hazen at the Canadian Defence Research Board weather and research station at Lake Hazen on Ellesmere Island where the team was [...]
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Looking back on the symposium “Trading Companies and Travel Literature”
One month after the Hakluyt Society Symposium in Chatham, I look back on the event with great pleasure and satisfaction. Run by Edmond Smith (PEIC), Aske Brock (PEIC), and myself, and financed by a generous award from the Hakluyt Society’s Harry & Grace Smith Fund, the symposium was a resounding success. This was due not only to the stunning environment of the Historic Dockyard in Chatham - and particularly the magnificent Royal Dockyard Church - which provided #Hakluyt17 with the best possible historical and maritime framing; but above all to the consistently high academic quality of papers presented and collegial and constructive discussion held over the course of two stimulating days. As always in these matters, the people [...]
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