Will Ryan’s long, distinguished and affectionate relationship with the Hakluyt Society has thrived on its particular set of virtues: a love of books and of learning, respect for record made accessible through editorship, an interest in people in their historical circumstances, and the simple pleasure of knowing things and sharing them. These features made the Society a natural locus for Will and he in turn has upheld its values and character.
The Hakluyt Society has maintained a core purpose since its foundation in 1846: to publish scholarly editions of primary accounts of voyages and other travels in durable volumes and to distribute these to subscribing members and through the book trade generally. Will joined the Society in 1975. He translated and annotated Abbot Daniel’s Pilgrimage from the old Russian original (the previously published translation having been from an unreliable French translation), which appeared as part of the Hakluyt Society volume Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 1099-1185 in 1988. It was the longest of the assembled texts and Daniel and Will have given us a charming, lively and (for Daniel) personal story: ‘I travelled that holy road unworthily, with every kind of sloth and weakness, in drunkenness and doing every kind of unworthy deed.’
Will became an ‘honorary secretary’ in 1990, a post which he held jointly with Sarah Tyacke and which included what would later be the duties of the ‘series editor’, a title adopted for Will and Sarah in 1995. Will would be a series editor, either on his own or jointly with Robin Law or Michael Brennan, through to his election as president in 2008.
In 2007 he was joined by two ‘honorary assistant series editors’, Gloria Clifton and Joyce Lorimer, who continue as series editors today. This means that Will shouldered this central responsibility at the Society for eighteen years. He then was president until 2011 and continues now as an active vice-president.
Will’s period as series editor saw many important volumes published and some major projects brought to fruition. The three volumes of Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples, 1555 spanned 1996-98 and the volume editor, Peter Foote, recorded that: ‘Will Ryan has seen these difficult volumes through the press. They could not have been in more capable hands.’ Will had the distinction of seeing the fifth and final volume published of a work that had required the attentions of many an honorary secretary or series editor, having spanned 1957-2000, after an initial proposal in 1922; this was The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325-1354. The Malaspina Expedition 1789-1794 in three volumes fell to Will’s watch and the editors acknowledge that his ‘meticulous overseeing’ created a text for the printer from ‘contributions reaching him in no particular order from the [four] different editors’.
The outstanding achievement of Will’s stamina and perseverance, however, is surely Russian California, 1806-1860. A History in Documents. This was published in two very large volumes in 2014, after Will was no longer series editor, but the series editorial work had definitely fallen to him. Former president Glyn Williams has mentioned to me that he has always noted that Will’s many commitments to the Society were carried out when he was a very busy and prestigious academic librarian, with his own commitments in research and publication. In 2013 Will was awarded the President’s Medal of the Hakluyt Society. In making this award, the president, Michael Barritt, quoted the opinion of Roy Bridges, Will’s immediate predecessor as president, which is worth recording here: […] few of those who have served as Honorary Secretaries and latterly Series Editors, vital as their contributions have been, were quite able to match the linguistic and technical skills as well as cultural awareness which Will has so devotedly deployed for our collective benefit.
So it is appropriate to end with a small instance of these skills. We give the last word to Abbot Daniel, in Will’s translation, who in the early twelfth century wrote what could be the credo of the Hakluyt Society: ‘I have set down everything which I saw with my own eyes, so that what God gave me, an unworthy man, to see may not be forgotten.’ Jim Bennett The Hakluyt Society, October 2020