Description

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This account of Drake's circumnavigation of the world in 1577-1580 was first published by his nephew in 1628 and appears to derive from notes made by Francis Fletcher, the chaplain to the expedition, although a surviving manuscript account by Fletcher is not identical. The introduction to this edition (published in 1854) discusses textual problems, and also puts the narrative into the context of Drake's career as one of the privateers who carried on England's unacknowledged war with Spain in the decades before the Armada.