Routledge is pleased to be the publisher for the Hakluyt Society.
The Hakluyt Society has for its object the advancement of knowledge and education, particularly in relation to the understanding of world history. The society publishes scholarly editions of primary sources on the 'Voyages and Travels' undertaken by individuals from many parts of the globe. These address the geography, ethnology and natural history of the regions visited, covering all continents and every period over the last two thousand years. Such texts, many previously available only in manuscript or in unedited publications in languages other than English, are the essential records of the stages of inter-continental and inter-cultural encounter.
Established in 1846, the Society has to date published over 350 volumes. All editions are in English. Although a substantial number of the Society's past editions relate to British ventures, with documentary sources in English, the majority concern non-British enterprises and are based on texts in languages other than English. Material originally written in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French or Dutch has regularly appeared, material in Russian, Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, Chinese, Persian or Arabic occasionally.
All editions contain an introduction and scholarly annotation, giving both the general reader and the student a degree of assistance in understanding the material and providing guidance on the relevance of the episodes described, within the context of global development and world history. Volumes are often generously furnished with maps and contemporary illustrations.
Information about the Society may be obtained from the Administrative Assistant at the following address:
Hakluyt Society, c/o Map Library, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DG, UK
Email: [email protected]
Edited
By Nigel Statham, Ian C. Campbell
March 17, 2023
John Martin (1789-1869) was a London-based, Edinburgh-educated physician interested in anthropological matters. This is his only book. He was inspired to write it by a chance encounter with its subject, William Mariner (1791-1853) who spent four years (1806-1810) in Tonga, in the South Pacific, one...
Edited
By Colin Heywood, Edmond Smith
November 21, 2022
This volume publishes for the first time, the journal kept by John Looker (?1670—1715) recording his service as ship’s surgeon on the Blackham Galley, a London-built merchantman on its second trading voyage to the Levant, between December 1696 and March 1698. Preserved in the Caird Library of the ...
By Pieter van den Broecke, James D. La Fleur
June 30, 2022
In the summer of 1630, Pieter van den Broecke returned to Amsterdam after completing his fifth voyage overseas as a commercial agent for various Dutch companies who were then expanding their worldwide trading networks. Van den Broecke used this homecoming to compose a lengthy manuscript describing ...
By Richard Jobson, David P. Gamble, P.E.H. Hair
June 30, 2022
In 1623 Richard Jobson published an account of a 1620-1621 English voyage up River Gambra, during which a party, led by himself, penetrated to a point some 460 miles up-river. The purpose of the voyage was to make contact with the gold trade of the West African interior, but in this there was ...
Edited
By R.J. Campbell
June 30, 2022
In 1819, William Smith, with a general cargo from Montevideo to Valparaiso, sailed further south round Cape Horn than his predecessors, in the hope of finding favourable winds. He sighted land in 62S. His report to the Senior Naval Officer in Valparaiso was ridiculed, but on a subsequent voyage he...
Edited
By Michael G. Brennan
June 30, 2022
Focusing upon three previously unpublished accounts of youthful English travellers in Western Europe (in contrast to the renowned but maturely retrospective memoirs of other seventeenth-century figures such as John Evelyn), this study reassesses the early origins of the cultural phenomenon known as...
Edited
By James McDermott
June 30, 2022
Martin Frobisher's third (1578) voyage to Baffin island was the consequence of flawed logic and excessive optimism on the part of the adventurers of the ephemeral 'Company of Cathay'. Their original intention - to find a north-western route to the Far East - had been largely forgotten following the...
Edited
By C. Ian Jackson, William Scoresby
June 09, 2022
William Scoresby (1789-1857) made his first voyage in the whaler Resolution from Whitby to the Greenland Sea, west of Spitsbergen, in 1800. Three years later he was formally apprenticed to his father and another three years saw him promoted to chief officer. On 5 October 1810, his twenty-first ...
By João Rodrigues, Michael Cooper
May 18, 2022
João Rodrigues sailed from Portugal to Japan in 1577, and there entered the Jesuit novitiate and was ordained priest. He met Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the virtual ruler of Japan, in 1591, and from that time became the missionaries' spokesman in dealings with Japanese authorities. He was also involved in ...
Edited
By William Barr
May 18, 2022
In the Autumn of 1854 Dr John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company astonished the world with the first news of the fate of the Franklin expedition, missing in the Arctic since 1845, on the basis of stories, rather vague as to time and place, which he had heard from Inuit in the vicinity of Pelly Bay. ...
Edited
By Joyce Lorimer
May 18, 2022
Sir Walter Ralegh's account of his 1595 expedition to the Orinoco in search of the fabled empire of El Dorado was an immediate publishing success and is one of the most important pieces of Elizabethan travel literature. This edition presents, on facing pages, the annotated texts of a previously ...
Edited
By Peter Rivière
May 18, 2022
This is the first of a pair of volumes publishing the full reports of Schomburgk's travels in Guiana between 1835 and 1844, previously available only in greatly abridged and heavily edited versions. Robert Schomburgk left his native Germany for North America in 1828, aged twenty-four. A year ...