Winners of 2016 Hakluyt Society Research Grants
Professor Daniel Carey (University of Galway) and Dr Gabor Gelléri (University of Aberystwyth) – Ars Apodemica Online – an online database of the arts of travel The work is geared toward the completion of an online database of early modern discussions of the art of travel (the ars apodemica). Prior work by Carey and Gelléri has: significantly increased the number of known texts of this type as compared to existing bibliographies; developed a descriptive methodology; and created the foundation for various visualizations that will benefit users of the database. Scholars of early modern travel have recognized the importance of attempts to reform and direct the practice of travel. The sheer [...]
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Maritime Trade, Travel and Cultural Encounter in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
PROGRAMME The Hakluyt Society Conference, Hull, 13-14 November 2015 The Hakluyt Society Conference programme Friday 13 November 2015 9.15 Registration and Coffee 9.45 Welcome (President of the Hakluyt Society) 10.00-12.00 Panel 1: Travel Accounts and Logbooks Chair: Nigel Rigby Paul Sivitz (Idaho State University), ‘Ship Captains and Science: Linking Physical and Virtual Mobilities in the Eighteenth Century’ Natalie Cox (University of Warwick) and Steven Gray (University of Portsmouth), ‘Tales from the “Happy Ships” of Empire: The Westminster Press ‘Log Series’ and the emergence of Naval travel writing, 1883-1910’ Lena Moser (University of Tuebingen), ‘“Totally unfit for an English Naval Officer”: The travels and career of Friedrich Lappenberg of Bremen, Master [...]
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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 runner-up Amy Bowles on “Sir Henry Mainwaring’s ‘A Brief Abstract’”
The manuscript circulation of Sir Henry Mainwaring’s "A Brief Abstract, Exposition and Demonstration of all Parts and Things belonging to a Ship and Practique of Navigation". By Amy Bowles In the early 1620s, the naval officer and reformed pirate Sir Henry Mainwaring composed what is now thought to be the earliest extant dictionary of nautical terms. The Brief Abstract, Exposition and Demonstration of all Parts and Things belonging to a Ship and Practique of Navigation contains around 600 entries, alphabetically ordered with a preface, table of contents, and often a decorative title-page. Mainwaring explained the necessity of this work, writing that ‘very few Gentlemen (though they be called Sea-men) doe [...]
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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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2015 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize
First, some words about the 2015 prize run. This year the prize committee consisted of Daniel Carey, Surekha Davies (Chair), Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Peter Hulme, Claire Jowitt and Suzanne Schwartz. They announced the results during the 169th Annual General Meeting of the Hakluyt Society, which took place in London on Wednesday 26 June 2015. Among a number of high-quality submissions, the committee held the opinion that the single outstanding contribution was the essay by Owain Lawson (Columbia University), entitled: ‘Constructing a Green Museum: French Environmental Imaginaries of Syria and Lebanon’. The Society is pleased that Mr Lawson could be present as the Society’s guest at the AGM, where he received a [...]
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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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Editing Hakluyt’s “The Principal Navigations”
Editing Hakluyt’s "The Principal Navigations": A (nearly) 10-year Progress Report By Claire Jowett Dan Carey and I first talked about producing a new scholarly edition of Richard Hakluyt’s major work The Principal Navigations over a drink on Friday December 9th 2005 after both attending a conference ‘New Worlds Reflected’, organised by Chloe Houston at Birkbeck, University of London. We both agreed that the lack of a scholarly edition of what is arguably the most important travel text ever published was a serious impediment to early modern scholarship, and we started to talk about what we could do about it. But which edition should be produced? The 1589 single-volume one, or [...]
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