A combination of historians, literary scholars, naval captains, archivists, curators, and even the odd former explorer, the Trustees of the Hakluyt Society collectively represent a wide range of expertise on travel and navigation. Yet few are as uniquely qualified to speak on the topic as Professor Jim Bennett, former Director of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford and, since 2016, President of the Hakluyt Society. This year, his Navigation: A Very Short Introductionwas published by Oxford University Press. In this blog, Professor Bennett reflects on the joys and challenges of discussing thousands of years of navigational development in a short book – or even a brief talk at a literary festival.
JB: My little book Navigation: A Very Short Introduction was published earlier this year and, as a more commercial work than my usual brief, I’ve had unfamiliar opportunities to speak at a few promotional events. I always accept, not because I imagine selling lots of books, but because it’s a nice experience that may never come again. So, I’m one of those speakers on the festival fringe, where the venue is a pub or bookshop, and a few people turn up because they want to fill their schedules and these tickets are free. Still, it’s fun – nice to feel part of the larger occasion and briefly to wear a badge marked Author.
But what to say? No-one really wants to understand position-line navigation, even if I could explain it in the time I have – perhaps as little as 20 minutes. I even did one so-called ‘speed dating’ event, where speakers circulated between groups with 10 minutes for each. These ‘VSIs’, as Authors learn to call their books, are, of course, heroic condensations in themselves – in my case of navigation at sea from the Bronze Age to post-GPS in 35,000 words – so how to distil that further into 20 minutes?
Navigation at sea is a very big story, spanning all historical epochs, cultures and oceans – a story of world history but told though a technical narrative. It was necessary to give some account of all the big players – from the Minoans in the Mediterranean, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, &c, sailing (usually) in a large but relatively enclosed sea, to the Pacific Islanders in the vast expanse of Oceania.
With my European history background, I was already comfortable with navigation in the Atlantic from the Norse to the Portuguese, Spanish, English and Dutch, with their introduction of techniques codified in mathematics and the use of instruments. But there was a great deal to say about the Indian Ocean with the overlapping and intersecting activities of the Egyptians, Arabs, Indians and Chinese – and eventually the Europeans. I also had to cover the growing convergence of technical resources into the modern age.
Cultural differences needed addressing as well as the geographical and technical. It struck me that Europeans marvelled at the navigational feats of Polynesian sailors, seeing their far-flung islands separated by great tracts of ocean, when Pacific peoples might insist that this is how they are connected.
Among the range of motivations for voyaging, I was pleased, for reasons that may be obvious when we meet, to devote a paragraph or two to the Irish of the early Middle Ages, who could represent an ascetic or devotional impulse. The plan was to settle in places where life would generally be considered impossible – with some success, before they were displaced from the Faroes and from Iceland by the very different strategy of the Vikings.
I should be careful not to mislead potential readers here. My narrative is driven by the technical development of navigation. I manage to mention Richard Hakluyt on page one, by using his Principal Navigationsto illustrate the general meaning of ‘navigation’, in contrast with the technical definition of his associate, the mathematician John Dee, where it refers to the means of locating a position and setting a course. But the technical is entangled with geography, history and culture.
When OUP invited me to write the book, I thought I should explain frankly that I am a historian, not a navigator. They explained in turn that a historical account of this technical topic was what they wanted and this proved to be wise, I believe. I have to deal with technical matters, however superficially, but readers unfamiliar with the business of navigation pick this up gradually, through its evolution over time.
Experienced navigators, on the other hand, will not be satisfied with the technical content of so short a book, but they probably know little of how their discipline evolved and who was responsible for its development.
Spanish mariner’s astrolabe, c.1600. Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.
If the subject is large, how am I to bring it within the compass of 20 minutes? One unifying notion I’ve been using is ‘the shared sky’. As I worked through how sailors in their different epochs, peoples and oceans dealt with the challenges of knowing where they were and of moving on towards their landfall, something that should have been obvious from the beginning dawned with increasing force. On the open sea, the sky was the same for everyone.
Different techniques were used to codify and utilise the sky, with different vocabularies and instruments (or with none), but the principles that everyone applied were broadly similar. They shared the same sky. Of course it looked different from different places and at different times – that was what gave the sky navigational purchase – but a grasp of the patterns and movements recurred within every formulation.
A further thought links us to all these different peoples and is the emotional hook I deploy to move my listeners to an empathy with my subject. We share this same sky. However remote we may seem from the Phoenicians or the Vikings, for direction and for what we call ‘latitude’ they used a ‘north star’, which they identified in the same whirling pattern as we observe today. I am always affected by this thought – a feeling perhaps shared by my modest audiences. They seem to leave happy to have ticked off another talk in the programme, some even with copies of my little book.
Prof. Joyce E. Chaplin (Harvard): ‘“No Land Unhabitable, Nor Sea Innavigable”: Hakluyt’s Argument from Design’
Followed by drinks reception 7.00PM–8.00PM, UPPER LIBRARY, CHRIST CHURCH
25th November, Christ Church
SESSION 4: 9.00AM–10.15AM BLUE BOAR LECTURE THEATRE
Chair: Prof. Joyce Lorimer (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Theatres of war, near & far
Prof. Carla Rahn Phillips (University of Minnesota): ‘Sarmiento’s Voyage to the South Atlantic and early 1580s International Politics’
Prof. Michael Brennan (University of Leeds): ‘Hakluyt, Howard of Effingham, and Naval Warfare’
10.15AM-10.45AM coffee UPPER LIBRARY
SESSION 5: 10.45AM–12. NOON BLUE BOAR LECTURE THEATRE
Rival ambitions
Chair: Prof. Joyce Chaplin (Harvard)
Prof. Joan-Pau Rubiés (Catalan Institute for Advanced Research): ‘Imperial Emulation and the Making of ThePrincipal Navigations’
Prof. Daniel Carey (NUI Galway): ‘Hakluyt and the Clothworkers: Long Distance Trade and English Commercial Development’
12.NOON-1.00PM lunch REFECTORY
SESSION 6: 1.00PM–2.40PM BLUE BOAR LECTURE THEATRE
Telling tales
Chair: Dr Matthew Day (Newman University, Birmingham)
Prof. Mary Fuller (MIT): ‘Consent and Dissent at High Latitudes: The Voyages of John Davis’
Prof. Claire Jowitt (University of East Anglia): ‘Heroic Hakluyt?’
Prof. Joyce Lorimer (Wilfred Laurier University): ‘“Writing for service”: Lawrence Keymis’s Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana (1596)’
2.40PM–3.00PM tea/coffee UPPER LIBRARY
SESSION 7: 3.00PM-4.40PM BLUE BOAR LECTURE THEATRE
Chair: Prof. Andrew Lambert (King’s College London)
Influences & legacy
Dr Heather Dalton (Melbourne): ‘Hakluyt and the Cabots’
Prof. Michiel van Groesen (Leiden): ‘Hakluyt and De Bry’
Dr John Hemming (Hakluyt Society): ‘Clements Markham’s half-century for the Hakluyt Society’
FREE PUBLIC LECTURE, 5.00PM–6.45PM, EXAMINATION SCHOOLS (SOUTH)
Chair: Prof. Jim Bennett (Hakluyt Society)
Prof. Michael Wood (Manchester): ‘Voyages, Traffiques, Discoveries’
Michael Wood tells three stories from the Age of Exploration, looking at meetings between civilisations in Mexico, India and China, with a coda on the coast of Sierra Leone. Exploring these cross-cultural encounters, the talk looks at what they tell us about Western ways of seeing the world beyond Europe.
In this stimulating follow-up to his recent guest blog on Theodore de Bry, Richard Hakluyt and the Business ofBooks, Emeritus Professor Jerald T. Milanichcontinues to explore Richard Hakluyt‘s international network. In the present blog, his focus is on establishing the origin of Theodore de Bry’s 1591 engravings of Florida Timucua Indians, taking his readers on a grand tour of the sixteenth-century world of art, print, and publishing.
In his The Representation of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590-1634),Michiel van Groesen points out that the 1591 Florida volume, among all the volumes, is peculiar for several reasons. First, the text is the only one of the 50 narratives that does not have a version published elsewhere. The narrative instead combines portions of René de Laudonnière’s account, previously published by Richard Hakluyt, with other sources, perhaps including information provided by Jacques le Moyne.
The title pages of both the Latin and German editions mention Le Moyne and Laudonnière while the German edition that was translated from the Latin edition also lists Jean Ribault and Dominque de Gourges as contributors. In 1568 De Gourges had avenged the 1565 Spanish attack on Fort Caroline (the French colony on the St. Johns River) with his own attack on the Spaniards. An account of the raid later was published in English by Hakluyt.
The 1591 Florida text may also contain information from another of the Fort Caroline colonists, Nicholas Le Challeux. Le Challeux’s Florida account was first published in France in 1566 (later published by De Bry in 1596 in a book with narratives about Peru and the Canary Islands). In reality the 1591 Florida volume, often mistakenly attributed solely to Le Moyne, is a composite of multiple accounts all of which are known from other sources except for Le Moyne’s own contribution, whatever that might have been.
Another peculiar thing about the Florida volume is that De Bry states that in order to publish the text it needed to be translated from English into Latin, not from French into Latin. Did someone other than Le Moyne or de Bry put the text together, somewhat like Hakluyt who had the English versions of Laudonnière, Ribault, and the others?
The Florida volume also is the only one of De Bry’s 27 books for which the engravings cannot be directly correlated with published or extant first-hand images, such as John White’s paintings or Hans Staden’s published drawings of Brazil. Making up images, however, was a common practice of De Bry. Van Groesen has shown that about 45% of the nearly 600 engravings in the 27 volumes were invented in De Bry’s shop. Many others are composite images that draw on multiple sources.
Van Groesen goes on to say that when De Bry invented an image, basing it on written accounts, he often included in the caption a phrase that went something like: “The history recounts that” or “derived from the account.” According to Van Groesen, at least 22 of the 42 Florida engravings were invented by De Bry, who drew their artistic muse from the accounts of Ribault, Laudonnière, possibly Le Moyne, and others.
How about the other engravings in the Florida volume? Did De Bry indeed acquire information, drawings, or paintings from Jacques le Moyne or his widow in London and, if so, were any of the latter as models for the engravings? De Bry states in the introductory remarks to the Florida volume that he did receive drawings from Le Moyne’s widow in 1588 (after Le Moyne had died in May of that year). An earlier attempt to acquire information from Le Moyne in 1587 had not been successful, though De Bry and Le Moyne (and Hakluyt?) may have had conversations about Florida.
What exactly did the art that De Bry received from Le Moyne’s widow in 1588 consist of? We don’t know. Some or all may have been the paintings and drawings Le Moyne did of European plants and animals, nearly a hundred of which are extant in archival collections in London and in New York.
De Bry’s 1591 engraving based on Staden, Thevet, or both.
Thevet’s 1557 engraving based on Staden.
A drawing from Staden’s 1557 book on Brazil.
I believe, after studying the 42 Florida engravings, that if Le Moyne supplied De Bry with sketches or drawing or paintings, it was not much. And I am not alone in that hypothesis. Of the 20 Florida engravings not overtly designated by De Bry to have been invented, Van Groesen has shown that 10 contain elements from other images, such as adding backgrounds. I would note that a large number of those 20 also contain elements taken from Staden’s Brazil images, which the De Bry’s later engraved.
De Bry also borrowed from André Thevet who in turn borrowed from Staden and others. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, attributing Brazilian Indian traits to images of North American Indians was a common practice.
Thevet’s 1557 engraving of a South American Indian.
Thevet’s 1557 engraving of a Florida Timucua Indian.
Close-up of de Bry’s 1591 engraving of Florida Timucua Indians based on Thevet.
Did De Bry have any idea of what the Timucua Indians looked like? I think he did, but I don’t think it came from Jacques le Moyne’s art. I think the images he used to engrave Timucua Indians came from John White.
Perhaps having not gotten what he needed from Le Moyne—who was dead—De Bry or more likely Hakluyt got John White to paint a Timucua man and a woman. I believe that White used his first-hand knowledge of American Indians and the narratives of Jean Ribault (published by Hakluyt) and René de Laudonnière to inform his two portraits of Timucua Indians. For instance, Jean Ribault wrote:
“The most part of them cover their waists and privities with hart [deer] skins painted most commonly with sundry colors; and the forepart of their bodies and armes, be painted with pretty devised works of [blue], red, and black…. The women have their bodies painted with a certain herb like unto moss whereof the cedar trees and all other trees be always covered. [The men are] naked and painted…; their hair … long and trussed up, with a lace made of herbs, to the top of their heads.”
And that is what White painted and what, I believe, found its way into de Bry’s engravings.
It is likely that Le Moyne never painted or drew a single Florida scene, but he may have provided information orally to De Bry and/or Hakluyt or in written notes that De Bry received in 1588 after Le Moyne’s death. Hakluyt may have played a role in combining such information with the accounts of Ribault, Laudonnière, and others to make up the text published in the Florida volume.
There is still work to be done, but what seems certain is that the Florida engravings cannot be accepted at face value as ethnographically accurate. They did, however, sell books and they continue to do so today.
Jerald T. Milanich is Emeritus Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of more than twenty books describing the Indian societies of the Americas and their interactions with Europeans during the colonial and post-colonial periods. Presently he divides his time between New York City and the Catskill Mountains.
Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616) was well connected to an international network of voyagers, printers, and publishers, and he liaised between German publisher Theodore de Bry and English artist John White for the sale of the latter’s watercolour drawings of Amerindians. This much is well-known. In this fascinating example of historical detective work – the first of two blog posts on De Bry’s 1591 engravings of Florida Timucua Indians – Emeritus Professor Jerald T. Milanichgoes further to unravel the links between Hakluyt, De Bry, White, Jacques le Moyne, and Sir Walter Raleigh.
In his 1946 book The New World, the First Pictures of America Stefan Lorant reprinted Theodore de Bry’s engravings of Florida Timucua Indians first published in 1591. Lorant included an English translation of the narrative that had accompanied the engravings in 1591. Lorant maintained that the images were based on paintings done by Jacques le Moyne, a member of a French colony on the St. Johns River in Northeast Florida in 1564-1565. He also attributed the narrative to Le Moyne.
Since 1946 scholars, museum exhibition designers, and others have treated the engravings as accurate renderings of the Timucua Indians and their material culture. More than one person has referred erroneously to the engravings as having been done by Le Moyne. It is highly likely, however, that De Bry, whose book company published 27 illustrated volumes on the Americas, Africa, and Asia, simply made up the engravings, basing them on his imagination, written accounts, and borrowings from extant images.[i]
Jerald T. Milanich, Emeritus Professor at the University of Florida, is the author of more than twenty books describing the Indian societies of the Americas and their interactions with Europeans during the colonial and post-colonial periods. Presently he divides his time between New York City and the Catskill Mountains.
The story of the images and text involves Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Hakluyt, English investors, a dead French artist, a live English artist, the lost Roanoke colony, and two French noblemen (one murdered, the other deceased). Events played out from Florida to London to Frankfurt.
Scheme (somewhat tongue in cheek) of the relationships among the principle actors in the story of the Florida engravings. By Jerald T. Milanich.
Those of us across the Atlantic, myself included, now realize that the De Bry Florida engravings are bogus. They are not accurate ethnographic depictions of the Timucua Indians.
De Bry, Hakluyt, and the Business of Books
In the sixteenth century, books about the Americas were hot sellers in Europe. Among them are Hans Staden’s 1557 account of living among the Tupinambá Indians in Brazil (in English: True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World); André Thevet’s three volumes (1557, 1575, and 1584; the 1557 title is: Les Singularitez de la France antarctique); and Richard Hakluyt’s 1582 Divers Voyages.
Hakluyt published additional narratives in his multi-volume opus Principall Navigations of the English Nation, including one by Thomas Harriot about the ill-fated Roanoke colony in coastal North Carolina. Hakluyt also was instrumental in the 1586 publication of René de Laudonnière’s Histoire Notable de la Florida (publishing an English edition the next year; Laudonnière had died in 1574).
How does Theodore de Bry fit into all of this? A successful goldsmith and metallurgist, De Bry was earning an international reputation as a skilled engraver who could create wonderful printed images. Up into the 1560s books had featured wood block prints. The newest rage, copper engravings like those being produced by De Bry, resulted in clearer, more complex images.
In September 1588 De Bry and his family moved to Frankfurt and beginning in 1590 and continuing well into the 1620s they ran a book publishing business that took advantage of copper engravings. At the time Frankfurt was the center of book production in Europe and for nearly four decades the De Bry firm was what Michiel van Groesen calls “one of the most remarkable publishing houses of early modern Europe.”
Prior to moving to Frankfurt, Theodore de Bry spent more than three years in London with his family, having moved there in 1585 from Antwerp. It was in London in 1587 that De Bry celebrated his 60th birthday and where he came into contact with Richard Hakluyt and Jacques le Moyne, whom Hakluyt had met previously and who would apparently provide De Bry (and Hakluyt?) with firsthand knowledge of the French settlement in Florida.
In London, Hakluyt and other Englishmen convinced De Bry to publish a series of illustrated books containing accounts by Europeans who had visited the Americas, many of which Hakluyt had already published or would publish. Hakluyt had access to John White’s paintings of Algonquian Indians in North Carolina and he had the account by Thomas Harriot of the unsuccessful Roanoke colony. Hakluyt also was working on Le Moyne to produce paintings of Florida, suggesting that Sir Walter Raleigh would pay him.
Hakluyt and others, all Protestants with ties to Sir Walter Raleigh, were willing to financially back De Bry in the new publishing venture. De Bry’s first volume was to feature Harriot’s Roanoke narrative illustrated with engravings of John White’s paintings. There were to be English, French, Latin, and German editions.
The four editions of that first volume issued in 1590 were a financial success. The second volume, the account of the French in Florida which Hakluyt also had suggested to De Bry, was published in 1591 in Latin and German editions, and a third volume, with Hans Staden’s account of Brazil appeared in Latin in 1592 and German in 1593. Likely all three volumes were planned with Hakluyt while de Bry was in London.
In subsequent years the De Bry firm published other volumes on the Americas, and then went on to publish books on Africa, southern Asia, and the Far East. Ultimately there would be 13 volumes on the Americas and 14 on Africa and Asia.
Part 2 of this blog will follow shortly
Jerald T. Milanich is Emeritus Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of more than twenty books describing the Indian societies of the Americas and their interactions with Europeans during the colonial and post-colonial periods. Presently he divides his time between New York City and the Catskill Mountains.
[i] European researchers like Michiel van Groesen, Christian Feest, and others have done much to clarify the sources of de Bry engravings and the le Moyne-de Bry connection. See van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590-1634) (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Feest, “Jacques Le Moyne Minus Four,” European Review of Native American Studies 1(1):33-38; 1988; John Faupel, “An Appraisal of the Illustrations,” in A Foothold in Florida, The Eye-Witness Account of Four Voyages made by the French to that Region, by Sarah Lawson (East Grinstead, West Sussex, England: Antique Atlas Publications, 1992), pp. 150-178.
Two free exhibitions will accompany this interdisciplinary conference, both to be launched in October 2016: Hakluyt and Geography in Oxford 1550–1650at 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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
A long-time reader and analyst of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (3 vols. London: 1598-1600), Professor Mary C. Fuller (MIT) is one of the best-placed persons to offer advice on how to read this founding document of English national identity. She did just that at the Hakluyt Society‘s 2016 Annual Lecture held at the University of Notre Dame‘s London campus on 21 June.
Addressing a captivated audience of Hakluyt Society members and their guests present at the 2016 Annual General Meeting, Professor Fuller singled out for analysis the geographical categories contained in Hakluyt’s collection of travel account as well as the multiple identity categories found in the patchwork of texts. In this blog post she highlights the main thrust of her argument.
MF: For me, one of the great challenges of working on Hakluyt’s collection has been finding productive ways to apply the tools of textual analysis – “literary criticism” – to a work that is not at all a “literary” text (or if it is, only in scattered moments), and which has both many discrete authors and one fairly taciturn editor. My Annual Lecture gave an overview of some lines of approach; I’ll describe a few of them here.
Mary Fuller (MIT), Experiments in Reading Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1600). Hakluyt Society Annual Lecture, 21 June 2016, University of Notre Dame London Campus.
Principal Navigations (1598-1600)[Hakluyt Society Extra Series, Nos. 1-12]is organized by geography: each of Hakluyt’s three volumes groups together voyages to particular parts of the globe.
It’s been my hypothesis – and an underlying principle of a forthcoming book I’ve been writing on Principal Navigations – that this organizing scheme creates categories that are meaningful for interpretation, both because the voyages themselves often shared common externalities and because these categories are an especially visible intervention by an author who is otherwise relatively hard to find in his book.
Starting from that idea, I’ve found that each section of Principal Navigations may bring certain topics and problems to the fore.
For instance, travellers to the Levant often engage a dimension of time, whether by registering perceptions of change in the physical or cultural environment over a long period, or by deferring to pre-existing practical or textual traditions. Hakluyt himself describes this part of the collection, uniquely, in terms of its temporal shape: so we could say that the Levant, as a category in the collection, has a distinctive property that we don’t see in representations of other regions.
The regional categories created by Hakluyt as editor are also interesting when they don’t track physical geography. A series of trading voyages with West Africa, beginning in the 1550s, can be found under the heading of “voyages without the straits of Gibraltar” in the second half of volume 2, which is generally devoted to “voyages to the south and southeast”. Although Hakluyt’s introduction to the volume focuses on voyages around Africa, to India and beyond, voyages to West Africa actually account for the largest share of pages in these extra-Mediterranean materials. As with voyages to the Levant, some regularities of practice and recording emerge when we read them as a set.
But this is by no means all the collection has to offer on West Africa. Many documents found in Hakluyt’s third volume, devoted to the Americas and other voyages to the West, also have something to say and include very significant information: for instance, John Hawkins’ attempts at imitating the Spanish trade in Africans as slaves. Following physical geography across the landscape of Principal Navigations begins to generate new questions and observations about Hakluyt’s conceptual map and those of his voyagers and authors.
The other geographical category I’d highlight – if we can turn from physical to political or human geography — is the ubiquitous one of Hakluyt’s title: these are the navigations of the English nation. Hakluyt’s collection has been described as a founding document of national identity. But no work of this complexity can offer a simple version of identity.
From the shifting boundaries of England and English-ness in the older materials of volume one, to the changing membership of the first-person plural in Hakluyt’s narratives of siege, warfare, encounter, and simple travel, Principal Navigations gives us a window into how its many versions of “us” were shaped, both in rhetoric and practice.
In the wake of the referendum vote to take Britain out of the EU, this topic of collective identity seems especially timely.
Currently she is working on a new book provisionally entitled Geographic Information in the Age of Drake: Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1600). With Matthew Day, she is editing Volume 9 of the new 14-volume critical edition of The Principal Navigations (Oxford University Press). Professor Fuller will be a visiting fellow at Balliol College, University of Oxford, this fall.
Happy New Year to all our readers! In our first post of 2015, professor Claire Jowitt (University of Southampton) offers extraordinary insight in the exciting work she has been carrying out together with professor Dan Carey (NUI Galway) on producing a brand new scholarly edition of Richard Hakluyt‘s Principal Navigationssuitable for the twenty-first century.
Dan Carey and I first talked about producing a new scholarly edition of Richard Hakluyt’s major work The Principal Navigationsover 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 arguablythe 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 the 1598-1600 three-volume one? There were pluses and minuses on both sides, we thought. As the wine continued to flow, we decided to organise an international conference on Hakluyt and to consult the broader scholarly community. Thus was a project born and, I hope, a life-long academic friendship.
In 2008 the National Maritime Museum hosted ‘Richard Hakluyt 1552-1616: Life, times, legacy’, attended by 120 delegates with upwards of 40 papers offered on all aspects of Hakluyt’s life and work, and the political, economic, and intellectual context of the time, with one session devoted to discussing the requirements for the new edition. The Hakluyt Society, especially the then President, Roy Bridges and the past President Will Ryan, offered wonderful support and advice, and members of the Society and its Council and Officers have continued to do so ever since. The discussion was passionate, with advocates for both versions of Hakluyt’s collection (the first vs. the expanded second edition) putting forward their views, but all agreeing that a new edition would further galvanise the already buoyant field of early modern travel writing. It was only after this, and much other consultation, that we finally settled on the larger later text since D.B. Quinn’s 1965 facsimile edition of the first version is textually reliable, still readily available, and has a super Introduction and index, despite not having other apparatus.
The three-volume edition gave us altogether a larger challenge but both Dan and I – as its General Editors – have always utterly believed in the importance of the project and hope that having a fully annotated edition of Hakluyt’s foundational travel text will be a tremendous boon to our own work as well as that of others. Since The Principal Navigations contains literally hundreds of accounts of exploration to all corners of the world, diplomatic and mercantile accounts and letters, rutiers, lists of commodities etc., it is also tremendously important that the text is fully searchable, so we decided that we wanted in due course to produce a digital online edition as well as a printed one.
This is not the type of project that can be done alone or even by two scholars; for an undertaking of this size and scope, a team of expert scholars is required, and very careful planning. Andrew Hadfield, Will Ryan, and Nigel Rigby, with Dan and I, spent months meeting together to scope the project. We recruited stellar international Editorial and Advisory Boards before ever we started contacting potential volume editors. Details of the full team are available at the Project Websitehttp://www.hakluyt.org/.
Assembling the right team and securing the publishing contract for the project with a top-notch publisher such as Oxford University Press was intense work. But from the Press, first Andrew McNeillie, and more recently Jacqueline Baker, have both been brilliant in their support for the project, now contracted in 14 volumesfor delivery starting in 2016/17, we hope. To date we have organised five Team Meetings and Editorial Workshops at the NMM, the National University of Ireland Galway, and the University of Southampton, and have upcoming meetings at the University of Oxford, the John Carter Brown Library in Rhode Island, and the University of Southampton.
There’s a genuine camaraderie amongst the team, and a tremendous desire to do a good job. We have also been immensely grateful to the generous support we, and our volume editors, have received from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Irish Government, the Modern Humanities Research Association, the Clothworkers’ Company, the Hakluyt Society, the Folger Library, and the Huntington Library, amongst others. We’ve also been immensely lucky in the Project RAs: (in chronological order for their work with us) Colm MacCrossan, Felicity Stout, Anders Ingram, and Lena Wahlgren-Smith. The project will only succeed if it’s a real team effort.
As I started to write this blog, I was shocked to realise that Dan and I have been working on this project for nearly 10 years. It’s not done yet, but it is now a realistic prospect that the academic community will have a scholarly edition of this foundational text within a few years. We certainly hope so. If, in the meantime, you want to find out more about the figure the Hakluyt Society chose to commemorate in 1846 when they selected a name, the first product of our collaboration on Hakluyt is already available. In 2012, as part of the Hakluyt Society Extra Series, Ashgate published our edited collection of 24 essays, Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe, which, taken together, advance the study of the literary and historical resources, international connections, and the rhetorical and editorial practices of this key figure in the promotion of English colonial and commercial expansion.
Claire Jowittis Professor of English at the University of Southampton and has been a member of the Hakluyt Society Council since 2012. With Daniel Carey, she is General Editor of the new OUP edition of “The Principal Navigations (1598-1600)”. Read more about the project here, or visit the project website.
Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt (eds.), ‘Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe’ (Hakluyt Society, Extra Series 47; 2012)Richard Hakluyt, ‘The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation’ (London: George Bishop, 1598-1600)
We are happy to announce the first of our series of guest blogs, this time by Hector Roddan (Cardiff University). In this contribution Hector reviews the usefulness of the Hakluyt Society’s publications for academic study. In a follow up blog, Hector will present some of the findings of his PhD research.
The publications of the Hakluyt Society are a fantastic resource. I was fortunate enough to make use of their editions of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigationsas well as several other works published by the Society whilst researching my doctoral thesis on representations of early modern religion in travel narratives. In this post, I explore some of the opportunities and challenges presented by the Society’s vast archive of published travel works.
Editorial practices have evolved over the hundred-and-fifty years since the Society began publishing travel texts. Although recent volumes come complete with scholarly annotations and footnotes, this is not always the case for older publications. Whilst these earlier works must be treated somewhat differently to modern scholarly editions of primary sources, they also provide some insight into how English perspectives on intercultural encounters have changed.
Older volumes, such as the 1905 facsimile edition of Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations (Extra Series, 1-12), remain valuable. I found it particularly useful in locating travel works relating to Russia, a major English trading venture when Hakluyt was writing. Whilst it has been superseded to an extent by more recent digital editions, as a reference tool and an introduction to Hakluyt’s monumental work, it remains essential reading. (Editor’s note: A new 14-volume critical edition of Hakluyt’s “Principal Navigations” is currently being prepared. Find out more here)
Hakluyt himself was not above censoring accounts (like those of Jerome Horsey and Giles Fletcher) which cast doubt on the civility of Russian government. As such, Hakluyt’s own text is not the definitive version of these intercultural encounters. The omissions and elisions of stringent critiques of Muscovite life only come to light when considered in light of other contemporary editions of Horsey and Fletcher’s texts.
Within Anglophone travel texts, the Society’s collections are valuable for identifying dissenting voices that contradict both colonial and post-colonial assumptions about early modern English representations of other cultures. Hakluyt himself catalogued contemporary knowledge of other societies in order to promote an Elizabethan maritime empire. Yet this ‘empire nowhere’ (to borrow Jeffrey Knapp’s phrase) did not lead in a straight line to the formal empires and imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Even amongst missionary communities in the early nineteenth century, the nature and scope of European authority was still being worked out. John Davies’ religious ethnography (Second Series, 116) betrays some of the conflicts between metropolitan assumptions about Tahitian idolatry and his own experiences at the sharp-end of nearly-failed religious colonialism.
The Society’s publications (and my own research) has focused chiefly on European travel narratives. From the mid-twentieth century, the Society has begun publishing travel works from non-Western sources (i.e. 2nd series, 110, 117, 141, 146, 172; 3rd series 19, 25, 26-27 (see image)). These fresh perspectives on the experience of travel provide a valuable counter-perspective to dominant European narrative of colonial expansion.
Through the Society’s publications, I have been able to access a variety of rare and sometimes obscure travel works. These sources provide a variety of perspectives on cross-cultural encounters of various kinds. Furthermore, the Society’s volumes are presented in an accessible way that makes them appealing both to academics and casual readers alike.
Hector Roddan is a PhD candidate at Cardiff University, supervised by Dr. Garthine Walker. He has recently completed his AHRC-funded doctoral project entitled ‘Defining Differences: The Religious Dimension of Early Modern Travel Narratives, c. 1550-c. 1800’. His research interests include travel writing and religious identities in the long early modern period.
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