Hakluyt@400 Quatercentenary programme Autumn 2016

This year is the 400th anniversary of the death of Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616) and the Hakluyt Society will mark this with an exciting programme of events in Oxford and at Hakluyt’s parish of Wetheringsett in Suffolk. Centrepiece of the Hakluyt@400 events will be the two-day international conference Richard Hakluyt and the Renaissance Discovery of the World, taking place in Oxford on 24-25 November (book your tickets here)

Two free exhibitions will accompany this interdisciplinary conference, both to be launched in October 2016: Hakluyt and Geography in Oxford 1550–1650 at Christ Church, Oxford, and The World in a Book: Hakluyt and Renaissance Discovery, at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. In addition, on Sunday 27 November there will be a commemorative service in All Saints Church, Wetheringsett, Suffolk. Read on for a detailed overview of events!

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Exhibitions

The two free exhibitions in Oxford will run from October to December 2016. On Friday 14 October, Hakluyt and Geography in Oxford 1550–1650 will be launched at Christ Church, Hakluyt’s old college, with a symposium on Renaissance scientific instruments and a reception. In November, events at Christ Church will include workshops on scientific instruments from the Christ Church collection by Dr Allan Chapman and Dr Stephen Johnston.

On Friday 28 October, The World in a Book: Hakluyt and Renaissance Discovery will be launched with a lecture (5:30pm) by William Poole (New College), introducing the books which heralded an era of exploration, discovery, and imperial expansion. The lecture opens a display at the Bodleian’s Weston Library of the works and collections of Richard Hakluyt. One of the greatest treasures of the library, the Codex Mendoza, once owned by Hakluyt, will be included in this exhibition.

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Commemorative Service

At 10.30 a.m. on Sunday 27 November, there will be a commemorative service in All Saints Church, Wetheringsett, Suffolk, IP14 5PP, Hakluyt’s parish, which will be led by the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, with the dedication of a stone plaque in memory of Richard Hakluyt. This will be followed by a buffet lunch in the Village Hall with a programme of music and readings. There will be an opportunity for small groups of Hakluyt Society members to visit the surviving part of Hakluyt’s former rectory.

Members who wish to be present at Wetheringsett are asked to contact the Society (office@hakluyt.com) as early as possible to assist the planning of the local organisers.

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Conference

The two-day conference, Richard Hakluyt and the Renaissance Discovery of the World, takes place on 24 November at the Bodleian Library, and on 25 November at Christ Church, Oxford. Twenty renowned experts on Hakluyt and early modern travel and exploration have accepted an invitation to speak at the conference. The keynote lecture on 24 November, “No Land Unhabitable, Nor Sea Innavigable“: Hakluyt’s Argument from Design will be delivered by Professor Joyce Chaplin (Harvard University). At the conclusion of the event on 25 November, a free to attend public lecture, Voyages, Traffiques, Discoveries, will be given by the well-known broadcaster and historian Professor Michael Wood (more info below).

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Full line-up

Keynote speakers

Professor Joyce Chaplin – Harvard University

Professor Michael Wood – The University of Manchester

Speakers

Professor Michael Brennan – University of Leeds

Professor Daniel Carey (organiser) – NUI Galway

Dr Heather Dalton – University of Melbourne

Professor Nandini Das – University of Liverpool

Professor Mary Fuller – MIT

Dr John Hemming – Hakluyt Society

Professor Claire Jowitt (organiser) – University of East Anglia

Professor Bernhard Klein – University of Kent

Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman – New York University

Professor Emerita Joyce Lorimer – Tri University

Professor Ladan Niayesh – Université Paris Diderot

Professor Michael Leroy Oberg – SUNY-Geneseo

Anthony Payne (organiser) – Hakluyt Society

Professor emerita Carla Rahn Phillips – University of Minnesota

Professor Joan-Pau Rubiés – Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Professor Emeritus David Harris Sacks – Reed College

Professor Sebastian Sobecki – University of Groningen

Dr Felicity Stout – The University of Sheffield

Professor Michiel van Groesen – Leiden University

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Registration and Bursaries

Registration for this two-day event costs £100 per person or £60 for members of the Hakluyt Society and for postgraduates. The fee includes coffee/tea, lunches, and a reception at Christ Church on the Thursday evening. Space is limited and early registration is advised.

A number of fee-waiver postgraduate bursaries are available, due to an award from the Society for Renaissance Studies. If you wish to apply for a bursary, please contact Professor Claire Jowitt (c.jowitt@uea.ac.uk) by 31 August 2016.

All postgraduates who register to attend the conference are entitled to a 50% reduction in membership of the Hakluyt Society for one calendar year (to £15.00). To join using this offer, please see http://www.hakluyt.com/hak-soc-membership.htm and also send confirmation of your registration to attend the conference to office@hakluyt.com.

To book your place, click here.

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Hakluyt Society Essay Prize 2017

The Hakluyt Society is pleased to announce the 2017 edition of the

Hakluyt Society Essay Prize

For the third year in succession, the Hakluyt Society awards its annual Essay Prize of £750. The prize will be presented, if possible, at the Society’s Annual General Meeting in London in June 2017, and winners will be invited to present their research at the next Hakluyt Society Symposium. Winners will also receive a one-year membership of the Hakluyt Society. The Society hopes that the winning essay will be published, either in the Society’s online journal or in a recognised academic journal.

Prize winners agree to acknowledge the receipt of their award in any future publication of the Prize essay. In addition, they will be expected to contribute to the Society’s public dissemination as appropriate. This may include, but is not limited to, presenting a paper at the Hakluyt Society Symposium (in which case travel expenses within the UK will be reimbursed) and contributing to the Hakluyt Society blog (for previous winners, see here and here).

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Eligibility criteria

The competition is open to any registered graduate student at a higher education institution (a university or equivalent) or to anyone who has been awarded a graduate degree in the past three years. Proof of student status or of the date of a degree must accompany any submission. Allowance can be made for parental leave.

 Scope and subject matter

Before considering the submission of an essay, entrants should visit the Hakluyt Society’s website (www.hakluyt.com) to make themselves aware of the object of the Society and the scope and nature of its publications. Essays should be based on original research in any discipline in the humanities or social sciences, and on an aspect of the history of travel, exploration and cultural encounter or their effects, in the tradition of the work of the Society.

Essays should be in English (except for such citations in languages other than English as may appear in footnotes or endnotes) and between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length (including notes, excluding bibliography). Illustrations, diagrams and tables essential to the text fall outside the word count. Submissions should be unpublished, and not currently in press, in production or under review elsewhere.

Submission procedures and deadline

Essays should be submitted as email attachments in Word.doc format to Richard Bateman, Administrator of the Hakluyt Society, at office@hakluyt.com by 30 November 2016. The entrant’s name, address (including preferred email address), institutional affiliation (if any, with date of admission), and degrees (if any, with dates of conferment) should appear within the body of the email, together with a note of the title of the submitted essay. The subject line of the email should include the words ‘HAKLUYT SOCIETY ESSAY PRIZE’ and the author’s name. By submitting an essay, an entrant certifies that it is the entrant’s own original work. A copy of these instructions can be downloaded here: Essay Prize 2017.

Selection procedure

The Judging Panel encourages innovative submissions that make an important contribution to knowledge, or a critical or methodological contribution to scholarship. The Panel and selected reviewers will pay attention to the analytical rigour, originality, wider significance, depth and scope of the work, as well as to style and presentation. The Panel comprises selected academic faculty from among the Hakluyt Society’s Council, including the Editorial Board of The Journal of the Hakluyt Society.

The Prize Committee reserves the right not to award a prize, if no submission is judged to be of sufficient merit. The Committee’s decision will be announced in April 2017.

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Essay Prize Series part 4: European Conceptualisations of Southeast Asian Sexual Diversity, c. 1590–1640

The 2016 edition of the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize competition attracted submissions from the UK, US, Australia, Russia, and Luxembourg. The academic committee, consisting of Professors Daniel Carey, Felipe Fernández­ Armesto, Peter Hulme, Claire Jowitt, Joyce Lorimer, and Sebastian Sobecki, has selected Nailya Shamgunova‘s essay European Conceptualisations of Southeast Asian Sexual Diversity, c. 1590–1640 as this year’s winning entry.  Ms Shamgunova will receive the award worth £750 at the Hakluyt Society’s 2016 Annual General Meeting, held in London on 22 June. Ahead of this event, she is glad to share the main conclusions of her prize-winning research on this platform, focusing on the contested issue of “sodomy” in seventeenth-century Anglophone travel writing. 

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** Missed this year’s competition? Watch the Hakluyt Society’s website and social media channels, as the call for submissions for the 2017  Hakluyt Society Essay Prize will be announced shortly **

My research focuses on the study of sexual diversity in a transcultural context. The ways in which people from different cultures understood each other’s sexual practices are fascinating. I used Anglophone travel accounts that refer to ‘sodomy’ in Southeast Asia in order to uncover some of the processes through which knowledge of Southeast Asian sexual practices was disseminated and adapted to an Anglophone worldview. I read primary travel accounts alongside other writings referring to sodomy – from medical texts and legal acts against sodomy to new editions of Aristotle and general cosmographies.

The broader context of my study is the issue of contact between ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ societies and how European understandings of those ‘non-European’ societies were constructed. Although its definition goes beyond Edward Said’s original thesis, the term ‘Orientalism‘ has been used to label the argument that European observers constructed an image of a non-European society to deliberately present it in a negative light.  I would like to counter and nuance these arguments in relation to the supposed ‘exoticising’ of non-European bodies (see Schmidt: 2015).

This study of Anglophone views on Southeast Asian sexual diversity offers the hypothesis that Anglophone observers of the region did not use ‘sodomy’ as a tool to represent local societies as inferior nearly as much as they could have done in the context of the realities of regional sexual diversity. Placing their works in the context of the wider Anglophone discourse on the connection between sodomy and nature in discussions of both the human body and political authority shows that that discourse possessed the necessary tools to read local sexual practices in a more negative light. Rather, a process of cultural translation of local practices into notions and anxieties about sodomy in wider Anglophone discourse took place.

My argument can be demonstrated using a case study of Anglophone explanations of practices of genital modification among men in Pegu and Siam. A large number of travel accounts pay special attention to ‘penis bells’, which the local men supposedly wore. The chief way of conceptualising penis bells was as a measure of prevention of sodomy, sanctioned by the local authorities. Both Ralph Fitch [See: Hakluyt Society Extra Series, 1-12] and Jan Huygen van Linschoten [See: Hakluyt Society First Series, 71-72) stated that the custom was ‘ordained’, and Francis Pretty elaborated, saying that ‘this custome was granted at the request of the women of the Countrey, who finding their men to be giuen to the fovvle sinne of Sodomie, desired some remedie against that mischiefe, and obtained this before named of the Magistrates’.  A later account by Thomas Herbert explained that ‘they haue beene (in foregoing times) wicked Sodomites; which filthy sinne was since corrected by a Queene Rectrix’, who, ‘vpon paine of death’, commanded her subjects to wear the bells.

The inhabitant from Pegu is the seated figure on the far left. Source: Linschoten, Itinerario, voyage ofte schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten, naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien (Amsterdam: 1596)

These accounts share the idea that some form of legislation was implemented by local authorities and rulers to prevent sodomy, and that it was effective, rather than the fact that Southeast Asian people were simply ‘sodomites’ and thus somehow inferior. Elsewhere in European discourse, such legislation was associated with ‘civilization’. As Richard C. Trexler argues, Garcilaso de la Vega [See: Hakluyt Society 1st Series, 41 and 45] and Antonio de Calancha presented the Incas as a civilizing imperial force, which stamped out previously prevalent sodomy in the Andes.  By representing a local authority as opposed to sodomy, Europeans could both emphasise that the role of civilization is to eradicate vice and that eradicating vice validated a society’s claim to be civilized. A similar process was happening in the descriptions of Southeast Asia. As there are no known indigenous sources that confirm the role of bells as measures for preventing sodomy, it remains unclear whether Anglophone authors were trying to translate local sexualities into their own terms or simply provide a rationale behind an unfamiliar practice.

However, the emphasis on the role of authority in eradicating sodomy, rather than on sodomy itself, is significant. It is a way of presenting the society in question in a less negative light.  A different explanation behind the practice, such presenting it as a marker of social identity, would have been more damaging to Pegu in Anglophone eyes. Prevention of sodomy allowed Anglophone authors to rationalise the practice in a way which was sensitive towards the local people.

One of the most interesting things to come out of my research was that when it comes to ‘sodomy’, it is very difficult to establish the boundaries of ‘Europe’ vs ‘non-Europe’ in the first place – for example, the most ‘sodomitical’ nations in Anglophone discourse were the Italians and the Ottomans. However, the role of religion in the process of formation of these stereotypes is ambiguous. Establishing the cultural boundaries of ‘sodomitical nations’ offers an alternative view of the notion of Europeans necessarily exoticising ‘non-European’ bodies and sexual practices. Exploring these notions further is the main purpose of my future research.

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Nailya Shamgunova (University of Cambridge) did her B.A. in History and M.Phil in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge, where she is due to start a PhD on Anglophone concepts of Ottoman sexual diversity this October. She is interested in various aspects of the early modern period in a transcultural context and has presented her work at a variety of academic venues. Nailya has volunteered for a Russian LGBT organisation and enjoys reading contemporary world literature in her spare time.

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Essay Prize Series part 3: This Year’s Result and Last Year’s Winner

The Hakluyt Society is pleased to announce the award of its 2016 Essay Prize. From a range of impressive submissions, the committee selected European Conceptualisations of Southeast Asian Sexual Diversity, c. 1590–1640 by Nailya Shamgunova (University of Cambridge) as the prize-winning essay. The Prize will be awarded to Ms. Shamgunova at the Society’s Annual General Meeting on 22 June 2016. Last year, Owain Lawson (Columbia University) received the first ever Hakluyt Society Essay Prize for his essay Constructing a Green Museum: French Environmental Imaginaries of Syria and Lebanon. Mr. Lawson reflects on the research leading to his prize-winning essay below.

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Owain Lawson (right) receiving the inaugural edition of the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize from the Society’s President, Michael Barritt. June 2015, London

In September 1922, Abbé Émile Wetterlé arrived at the port of Beirut as part of the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon’s agricultural commission. In his subsequent publications, he remarked on the astonishment he felt upon seeing for the first time the gentle rangeland of the Lebanese littoral. Steeped in biblical and orientalist representations of Lebanon, Wetterlé expected to see the dense Lebanese cedar forests described in the Bible. The absence of these forests implied to Wetterlé that Ottoman mismanagement and Arab indolence had devastated Lebanon’s natural splendour, and that France must rehabilitate the Lebanese environment.

My essay, which to my great surprise and deep gratitude won the Hakluyt Society’s essay prize, inquires into what forces shaped Wetterlé’s expectations. It investigates the diverse intellectual, scientific, and cultural sources of his belief in a degraded Arab environment and traces its trajectory through nineteenth-century scientific and travel writing to its influence in legitimating French Mandatory rule in Syria and Lebanon following World War I. I originally prepared this essay as part of my MA thesis at the American University in Cairo. It owes a great debt to the work of Richard Grove and Ussama Makdisi, but most importantly to Diana K. Davis and her concept of the “environmental imaginary.” This term is useful to capture the confluence of scientific, economic, religious, intellectual, emotional, and ideological forces at work in descriptions of nature.

Nineteenth-century visitors such as Ernest Renan, the Comte de Volney, and Alphonse de Lamartine, and later Mandatory officials such as Wetterlé and General Gouraud, had access to a great variety of textual and artistic representations of Greater Syria. These included classical and Arabic geographies, biblical accounts, and contemporary archaeological, climatological, and ethnographic science. They mobilized these sources to not only describe the Lebanese environment but to imagine its ancient natural state and prescribe methods to return Lebanon to that idealized condition. Biblical Lebanon’s dense cedar groves epitomized that ideal. Through a century of travel, writing, painting, and research, rehabilitating Mount Lebanon’s forests became part of France’s mission civilisatrice in the Levant and contributed to justifying their occupation and Mandatory rule. Syrian-Lebanese intellectuals did not passively receive this narrative, but rather contributed to its production and actively contested, negotiated, and reaffirmed it for their own purposes.

My interest in this subject emerged from my own work in reforestation, which provided a unique window into the relationship between efforts to extract natural resources and to preserve natural landscapes. Profound technological, economic, and scientific transformations over the last centuries have rearranged how most humans engage with the natural world. Indeed, many of us, myself included, can now only imagine nature as diminishing and fragile. In this light, environmental conservation efforts appear to be unambiguously positive practices. How then can we understand the discrepancy between these apparently noble intentions towards nature and the ease with which colonial officials translated them into a justification for colonial domination and violence? My intention with this essay was not to simply expose colonial conservation efforts as hypocritical, or debunk the nineteenth-century science that informed them, but to think about the longer trajectories of this relationship between nature and power.

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Owain Lawson is a PhD student at Columbia University’s Department of History. His research focuses on the history of science, technology, and the environment in Lebanon and Greater Syria during the early twentieth century. He is in the early stages of developing a dissertation that explores the history of Lebanese hydroelectricity. Born in Ottawa, Canada, Owain received a B.A. from Concordia University in Montréal and an M.A. in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo.

Tancrede R. Dumas, “Beirut Port”, Beirut, 1860-1870, Nawaf Salam Collection, Arab Image Foundation, Beirut.

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Winners of 2016 Hakluyt Society Research Grants Announced

The Hakluyt Society is delighted to announce the outcome of its 2016 Research Funding initiative, made possible by the establishment of the Society’s Harry & Grace Smith fund. Out of the numerous excellent applications received during this inaugural funding competition, the committee has decided to make seven awards of a Hakluyt Society Research Grant or a Hakluyt Society Short-Term Fellowship.

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Winners Hakluyt Society Research Grant 2016

– 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 scale of contributions to this debate, between c.1575–c.1850, in the form of essays, letters, treatises, and disputations, has not been appreciated. Many hundreds of such works appeared across Europe (including previously unknown contributions from Sweden, Poland, Hungary as well as England, France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries). They established conventions for Continental travel and more distant journeys with widespread influence. The database will allow academic and wider public access to this rich material.

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– Dr Cheryl Fury (University of New Brunswick, Saint John) – The Human Dimension of the Early Voyages of the English East India Company

The project centres upon the less affluent members of the English maritime community. The focus of the work is upon the men of the East India Company and their struggles to establish a toe-hold for English trade in Asia. There are very few works that deal with the early EIC voyages in detail. This project examines the official accounts in conjunction with shipboard wills which provide a different viewpoint. The work extends from current research on the EIC. Here, my concern is with matters of health care and shipboard disturbances (1610–1620). Eventually, this research will culminate in a book on the first 20 years of the East India Company.

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– Dr Maura Hanrahan (Memorial University, Newfoundland) – Transcribing and Contextualizing the Diary of Bjarne Mamen of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1914

Bjarne Mamen was the twenty-two year assistant topographer with the northern party of the doomed 1913–1914 Canadian Arctic Expedition (CAE). Mamen’s unpublished diary begins on 28 July 1913 and ends on 22 May 1914. Mamen’s diary allows for a reconstruction of the Karluk voyage, drift and sinking, followed by the survivors’ long wait for rescue on Wrangel Island. It provides us with the intimate perspective of a young polar explorer who is keenly aware of the grave danger he faces. Besides weather observations, shipboard activities, and meals, Mamen writes of the sometimes fraught relations between expedition members, his hopes for his time in the Arctic, and, as time passes, his ailments and fears. Mamen died in a windblown tent on Wrangel Island three months before rescue came. The last words entered in the diary are ‘I for my part cannot stand staying here’.

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– Stephanie Mawson (PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge) – Slavery, Trade and Witchcraft in the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Pacific

The work is towards a PhD thesis on the social history of empire in the seventeenth-century Philippines, looking at the topics of slavery, trade and witchcraft. The research highlights the tenuous nature of empire and reveals the Philippines as a site of ongoing contestation between the Spanish and Southeast Asians. The history of this extraordinary archipelago brings together Spanish merchants and royal officials, indigenous Filipinos, Mexican convicts, Chinese merchants, Islamic pirates, religious missionaries, representatives of the Dutch, Portuguese and British empires and a multiethnic, itinerant maritime labour force. All of these people interacted within the culturally diverse, yet politically integrated context of Maritime Southeast Asia. The current historiography of the Spanish presence in the Philippines largely ignores this regional context, choosing instead to focus narrowly on the questions of how and why the Spanish were able to bring the people of the Philippines under imperial control. This work is geared towards turning these questions on their head, and to ask how regional and local social relations constrained, conflicted with, and ultimately shaped, the Spanish project of empire within the Philippines.

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– María Gracia Ríos (PhD candidate, Yale University) – Claiming Sovereignty: Sir Francis Drake and the Just Titles of Spain to the Indies

In the late sixteenth century, Sir Francis Drake constituted a persistent threat for the Spanish empire. In this project, I argue that Drake’s attacks on Spanish America led to a reconstruction of the history of the discovery and conquest of America in both Spanish and English writings of his time. I seek to comprehend how, as a result of Drake’s circumnavigation voyage, both Spanish and English authors claimed sovereignty and possession of the New World using the same rhetorical tools and expressing the same demands for implementing an overseas empire. By illustrating the literary interconnections between these nations, the research aims to move beyond the specificity of monolingual and mono-disciplinary perspectives that have characterized studies on New World colonization, and to contribute to scholarship on the ways in which ideas and people circulated across the formal boundaries of empires and nations in the early modern Atlantic world.

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– Dr Sarah Thomas (Birkbeck, University of London) – The Art of Travel in the Name of Science

This research explores the salience of mobility to an understanding of visual culture in the colonial period, focusing in particular on the works of art produced on board

Matthew Flinders’ inaugural circumnavigation of Australia between 1801 and 1803 by British landscape painter William Westall (1781–1850), and Austrian botanical artist, Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826). Mobility was a strategic advantage for such artists in providing new material to record both for Enlightenment science and a broader European public, yet it also presented logistical, aesthetic and philosophical challenges. The work not only considers the status of the peripatetic artist as ‘eyewitness’ in this period, but also examines the mobility of visual culture itself, and the implications that this has for art history in a globalised world.

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Winner Hakluyt Society Short-Term Fellowship 2016

– Katherine Parker (PhD candidate, University of Pittsburgh) – Studies in the Reception and Dissemination of the Anson Expedition

Anson’s circumnavigation and his capture of a Spanish treasure galleon in 1740–44 caused a sensation from London to Lima to Manila, while the publication of print materials spread the story almost as widely as Anson had sailed. Despite the importance of the Anson expedition to eighteenth-century peoples, it has received relatively little modern scholarly attention – due, in part, to the field of Pacific exploration’s overwhelming focus on the voyages of the later eighteenth century, particularly those of James Cook. This research project considers the ways in which the Anson expedition and the publications surrounding it were central to the development of the Royal Navy, Pacific exploration, and print culture. The Anson expedition and associated publications helped re-write the modern globe as Europeans knew it.

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The Hakluyt Society wishes the awardees good fortune in their research and is looking forward to see these fascinating projects come to fruition. For more information about the competition and to keep posted about the 2017 round of HS Funding (deadline February 2017), see www.hakluyt.com or follow us on Facebook or Twitter. The Hakluyt Society Research Funding competition is open to anyone whose research interests meet with and promote the Society’s objectives. All applicants must be members of the Hakluyt Society.

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NEW: Hakluyt Society Research Grants

A New Year, a New Initiative!

After the launch of the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize in 2014 and the great success of the first Hakluyt Society conference in November 2015, the year 2016, which marks the quatercentenary of Richard Hakluyt’s death, sees the introduction of two brand new research funding initiatives from the Hakluyt Society: The Hakluyt Society Research Grant and The Hakluyt Society Short-Term Fellowship.

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In furtherance of the principal objectives of the Hakluyt Society, namely to promote the study of historical exploration, travel, and worldwide cultural encounter, the Society has established two schemes of research funding open to anyone whose research interests meet with and promote the Society’s stated objectives.

Applications for funding for the year 2016 must be received by 15 February 2016 (17:00 GMT) at researchgrants@hakluyt.com. All applicants must be members of the Hakluyt Society. Those who currently are not members but wish to become so can join the Society online. The application form can be downloaded here.

As stated on www.hakluyt.com, the Society makes multiple research grants available in any given calendar year:

The Hakluyt Society Research Grant, up to six of which will be available per calendar year, with a maximum allocation of £1500 each.

The Hakluyt Society Short-Term Fellowship, two of which will be available per calendar year. The Fellowship may be held for a maximum of four months, with a maximum allowance of £1650 per month.

For further particulars about the application procedure, please consult the Guidelines to Hakluyt Society Research Funding:

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#HakluytHull: The Hakluyt Society Conference, 13-14 November 2015

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To register, please follow this link. Find the full programme here and more information about the conference here.

The Hakluyt Society looks forward to welcoming you in Hull on 13 and 14 November 2015.

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Programme: The Hakluyt Society Conference, Hull, 13-14 November

The Hakluyt Society Conference:

‘Maritime Trade, Travel and Cultural Encounter in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’

Location: Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, 27 High Street, Hull. HU1 1NE

Friday 13 November – Saturday 14 November 2015

** Registration is free for Hakluyt Society members and £30 to non-members **

Order your tickets here

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PROGRAMME 

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 RN’

Donald Laskey (Central Michigan State University), ‘Joshua Slocum and the Nineteenth Century Planetary Performers’

12.00-1.00 Lunch

1.00-3.00 Panel 2: Cultural Exchange

Chair: Jenny Balfour-Paul

Nigel Rigby (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich), ‘Exhibiting Captain Cook at the National Maritime Museum, 1937-2018’.

Ryan Holroyd (Pennsylvania State University), ‘Responsibility, Red Tape, & Wretchedness: The English East India Company’s Disappointment in the Chinese Port of Xiamen, 1684 – 1720’

Tika Ramadhini (Leiden University), ‘The Arabs in the Lesser Sunda Islands: Cultural Brokers from a Diaspora in the Late 19th Century’

Paul Hughes, ‘Restoration: Portrait of a Seventeenth Century Navigator’

3.00-3.30 Tea/Coffee

3.30-5.30 Panel 3: Empires

Chair: Guido van Meersbergen

Noelle Nadiah Richardson (European University Institute), ‘Abandoned Backwater? Revisiting Goa and Global Trade in the Eighteenth Century’

 Nida Nebahat Nalçacı (Istanbul University), ‘Dissolution of Ottoman Diplomatic Arrogance: The Case of POWs in Ottoman Istanbul’

 Chris Petrakos (University of Toronto Mississauga), The Yukon Commissioner’s British Tour: The Atlantic and the Making of the Canadian West, 1897-1900

 Guy Collender (Birkbeck, University of London), Strikes and solidarity: Parallels between dockers’ unions in Great Britain and Australia in the late 19^th century

6.00 p.m. Reception – Blaydes House

7.00 p.m. Keynote Lecture at WISE – David Richardson (WISE, University of Hull), ‘Inside out: Technological and cultural change in shaping Atlantic history, 1650-1860’

Evening: Free time for delegates

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Saturday 14 November

9.30 Coffee

10.00-12.00: Panel 4 – Slavery

Chair: David Richardson

Lauren Bell (University of Hull), ‘Captive passengers: Connecting the slave trade and convict transportation through cultural encounters and voyages of exploration’

Kimberly Monk (University of Bristol), ‘“A Most Valuable Cargo”: The Design and Development of the West Indiaman, 1773-1843’

 Jamie Goodall (Stevenson University), ‘Tippling Houses, Rum Shops, & Taverns: How Alcohol Fueled Informal Commercial Networks and Knowledge Exchange in the West Indies’

Molly Corlett (University of Oxford), ‘Transatlantic Blackness in Eighteenth-Century England’

12.00-1.00 Lunch

1.00 – 2.30 Panel 5 – Knowledge Construction, Survey and Hydrography in West Africa

Chair: Nicholas J. Evans

Suzanne Schwarz (University of Worcester), ‘“A Just and Honourable Commerce”: Abolitionist Experimentation in Sierra Leone in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’

Michael Barritt (President of the Hakluyt Society), ‘“A proper person to succeed Mr Dalrymple”: Captain Edward Henry Columbine and hydrographic data-gathering by the Royal Navy in the Great War 1795-1815’

Silke Strickrodt (Centre of Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin), ‘Cartography in the Service of Abolitionism: The Royal Navy’s Surveys of the West African Coast in the Nineteenth Century’

2.30-3.00 Coffee

3.00-4.30  Panel 6 – Sierra Leone

Chair: Suzanne Schwarz

Mary Wills (WISE, University of Hull), ‘Cultural encounters between West Africans and Royal Navy officers of the 19th century anti-slavery squadron’

Erika Melek Delgado (University of Worcester), ‘Liberated African Children: Recaptives in the Crown Colony of Sierra Leone, c. 1808-1819’

Nicholas J. Evans (WISE, University of Hull) – ‘Jewish Traders on the West Coast of Africa’

Close

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Free Town, Sierra Leone. From: Thomas Eyre Poole, ‘Life, Scenery, and Customs in Sierra Leone and the Gambia’ (London: 1850). Courtesy of the British Library.

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PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Getting to the conference venue

The conference will be held at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), Oriel Chambers, 27 High Street, Hull, HU1 1NE, United Kingdom.

Hull has good transport links to the major cities of England. The city is located 200 miles from London, 100 miles from Manchester and around an hour’s drive from Leeds and York. It has easy access to several airports including Humberside, Manchester, Leeds/Bradford, and Teesside. P&O Ferries also offers daily overnight services to Rotterdam and Zeebrugge from Hull’s own port. Hull is served by rail and bus at the Paragon Interchange, which is a 15 minute walk from the conference venue. National Express coaches, local buses and taxis depart at the Paragon Interchange.

Accommodation

Please find below a non-comprehensive selection of nearby hotels to aid your booking process

http://www.premierinn.com/en/hotel/HULBAR/hull-city-centre
http://www.mercure.com/gb/hotel-8203-mercure-hull-royal-hotel/index.shtml
http://www.kingstontheatrehotel.com/
http://www.accorhotels.com/gb/hotel-3479-ibis-hull/index.shtml
http://www.holidayinn.com/hotels/gb/en/hull/huynh/hoteldetail?
http://www.hiexpress.com/hotels/gb/en/hd/united-kingdom/kingston-upon-hull-hotels

Registration

Registration is free for new and existing Hakluyt Society members and £30 to non-members. To order your ticket simply click here and fill in the online registration form. You can join the Hakluyt Society as a new member online at www.hakluyt.com. Please be advised that advance registration will close on 7 November 2015.

If you have any questions regarding this event, please contact the conference administrator, Dr. Guido van Meersbergen, at guido.meersbergen.09@ucl.ac.uk

The Hakluyt Society and WISE look forward to welcoming you in Hull

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Essay Prize Series Part 2: The Manuscript Circulation of Sir Henry Mainwaring’s ‘A Brief Abstract’

In this second part of our mini-series on the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize, runner-up in last year’s competition Amy Bowles (Girton College, Cambridge) shares with us her innovative research on 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. The earlier blog by fellow runner-up Katherine Parker can be found here and the CFP for the 2015-2016 competition (deadline: 1 November) here.

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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 fully and wholy understand what belongs to their Profession: having onely some Scrambling Termes & Names belonging to some parts of a Ship’.[1]

Though the dictionary was composed between 1620 and 1623, it was printed for the first time in 1644, and enjoyed around twenty years of circulation in manuscript amongst seafaring noblemen. In one case, a manuscript’s weathered state attests to its regular use; BL Additional MS 21571 – the only copy produced in a pocket-friendly octavo format – retains significant water damage, perhaps acquired during its direct consultation at sea. However, the dictionary was also regarded as more than a reference work, and was catalogued and read alongside fashionable travel narratives like Richard Hakluyt‘s Principal Navigations (1598-1600) and Samuel Purchas‘ Purchas his Pilgrims (1625).

My submission to the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize competition examined the twenty-one surviving copies of the Brief Abstract, eight of which were written by a single scribe, Ralph Crane.The dictionary’s manuscript circulation began with Crane’s early production of copies: his manuscripts include the five presentation copies dedicated – and in one case subscribed – by Mainwaring. It is my argument that Crane not only participated in the circulation of this text during its early stages, but that he was the sole scribe hired by Mainwaring to complete this project, taking on the role of a commissioned copyist. Crane’s early “official” copies of the dictionary were soon outnumbered by a proliferation of less authorised versions, which contained new entries, circulated under new titles, and no longer bore Mainwaring’s name.

I reconstructed the text’s original transmission through the different scribal styles and habits of the dictionary’s early copyists, and considered the manuscript transmission of the Brief Abstract in light of that of other naval works such as William Monson‘s tracts on seamanship, Nathaniel Boteler‘s Dialogues, and John Montgomery‘s sixteenth-century A treatice concerninge the navie, all of which also involved repeated copying by single scribes. By reconstructing the Brief Abstract‘s early circulation, my essay demonstrated the lasting effects which scribal transmitters have had upon the content of this important seventeenth-century naval text.

[1]     Henry Mainwaring, A Breife Abstract, Exposition, & Demonstration of parts & things belonging to a SHIP, & ye practique of NAVIGATION, National Maritime Museum Caird Library MS LEC/9, f. 11v.

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Amy Bowles is a PhD student at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the scribal circulation of early modern texts, with particular focus on the copyist Ralph Crane. She is also interested in scribal imitation of print, and the construction of early modern manuscripts more generally, especially bindings, bookmarks, and marbled paper. She can be found on Twitter as @amy_ab2126 

Henry Mainwaring, ‘A Breife Abstract, Exposition, & Demonstration of parts & things belonging to a SHIP, & ye practique of NAVIGATION’. Lambeth Palace Library Sion College MS L.40.2/E48, fol. 1r.

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Essay Prize Series Part 1: Printing the Pacific

The submissions for the 2014-2015 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize showcased some of the most exciting new research in the field of the history of travel, exploration and cultural encounter currently undertaken by postgraduate students and early career researchers. We are glad to announce that the top-3 contestants have kindly agreed to introduce their work on this blog. In this first installment of our mini-series on the Essay Prize, Katherine Parker (Pittsburgh) writes about her PhD research on Pacific travel writing which resulted in her excellent submission entitled ‘Circling a paper world’.

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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, I outline the major players and interdependent relationships within London that worked together to bring the Pacific to the printed page, followed by an analysis of the publication of a particular travel account, Anson’s Voyage Round the World (London: John and Paul Knapton, 1748) (see image). By tracing how information was gathered at sea and fixed in text and on maps, it is possible to see the trans-imperial collaborative, yet competitive, effort necessary to create a world on paper. Such a paper world was a vital tool that spurred European expansion later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

I posit that when historians of the book write of book “production” they must more seriously examine the source material that went into the work, as well as the materials that make up a book. In this case, experiences at sea conditioned how the Pacific as a space was conveyed in text and engraved illustration, creating a deceptive sense of place for a readership that would never see the region. Of course, reader response is a complex reaction that cannot be controlled by author or editor, but it can be conditioned by material presentation. This theme is addressed through a discussion of the many forms, sizes, and changing presentations of the Voyage over time. Finally, the lessons learned about publishing Pacific travel accounts would serve as examples for later works, especially those of the nineteenth-century polar expeditions. Thus, Pacific exploration publications affected not only other spaces opened to imperial expansion, but also the book industry itself.

Briefly, I would like to describe my broader dissertation topic. The Pacific region was a salient topic throughout eighteenth-century Britain, especially from the late-seventeenth century culminating in the celebrated voyages of James Cook. When people mentioned the area, they touched upon discussions of overseas commerce, imperial politics, and navigational technology. As these discourses were presented primarily via print media, the Pacific had to shift from observable entity to material product negotiated through numerous overlapping networks of production, circulation, and reception. How the Pacific came to material form represents a reciprocal, dynamic system of the creation of knowledge that is at once global and yet centered primarily on a particular place and time—eighteenth-century London.

Thus, printing the Pacific is a localized history of a global process, a globilocal sociology of texts[1] that results in the assimilation of a newly-encountered region into quotidian print practices and representations. Such a domestic history of Pacific exploration, with an especial focus on material culture, has never been told.

[1] The term sociology of texts is from D. F. Mckenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of the Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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Katherine Parker is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation traces the production, dissemination, and reception of geographic knowledge about the Pacific region prior to the voyages of James Cook. In 2013-15 she studied in London archives as a Social Sciences Doctoral Dissertation Fellow (2013-4) and as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow (2014-5). Currently, she is serving as the John R. Bockstoce Fellow in Pacific Ocean Studies at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island.

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Title page of the Royal First Edition of Anson’s ‘Voyage around the World’.
Courtesy Mr. Colin Paul

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