SOURCE: Taylor, E. G. R. “Samuel Purchas: 1612-26.” In Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, 1583-1650: A Sequel to Tudor Geography, 1485-1583, pp. 53-66. New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1968.

[In the following essay, Taylor analyzes the works of Purchas and finds them to be as invaluable to readers of modern times as they were to readers of the past. In addition, he defends Purchas against his detractors.]

Among the readers of Drayton's Polyolbion was a man who had pored also over the pages of Hakluyt and Ramusio, who had delighted in the Collections of De Bry and in the Virginian pictures of de Morgues. This man was Samuel Purchas, who, born in 1577, in Thaxted in Essex, and destined never to leave his native land, never even to travel so far as two hundred miles from his birthplace, made up his mind, while still at St. John's College, Cambridge, to win fame through the medium of voyages and travels. He had the advantage that he was a parson, and his preferment to the cure of the South Essex village of Eastwood, near the little port of Leigh, brought him into contact with seafaring men, both active and retired. These found in him an absorbed listener to their narratives of adventure, and one who took genuine pleasure in examining the curios that they had brought home. His remark regarding a certain manuscript, that he had it of Master Borough, Controller of Her Majesty's Navy, opens the possibility that this old seaman was one of the formative influences of his young manhood, for Wm. Borough died in 1599. Be that as it may, Purchas acquired travelled friends and acquaintances in all walks of life, and among them was George Barkley, a London merchant. As a young man, Barkley had travelled through Eastern Europe, visiting Poland, Russia and Livonia, and finding himself on one occasion the guest of honour in a Tartar tent. It was in 1605 that Purchas took down a relation of these adventures. Later on Barkley became an investor in the second Virginia enterprise, and visited the Summer Islands on his way to America. Later still, his restless spirit carried him to the East Indies, where he died. Whether through Barkley's influence or no, Purchas made several other useful friends in the circle of the Adventurers to Virginia. They included Richard Pots, secretary to the Council, the Rev. Wm. Crashaw, their chaplain, the Rev. Wm. Symonds, one of their chroniclers, and, most important of all, Captain John Smith, the soldier of fortune who saved the young colony from disaster. Outside this group, John Selden, the Jurist, was also early Purchas's friend, as were Thomas Coryat, the eccentric traveller, and Henry Briggs, the noted mathematician: he must, therefore, have had intellectual and personal qualities which made him welcome alike among practical and among learned men.

At a date which could hardly have been later than 1611,¹ he conceived the idea of making his cosmographical gleanings, and his systematic geographical reading, the basis of a work which his chosen profession and his Cambridge studies in Divinity would also assist him to carry out: namely, a Relation of the Religions observed in All Ages and All Races Discovered (1017). This was the sub-title of the rather grotesquely named Purchas his Pilgrimage, a work that has not received in modern times the recognition it deserves, although widely appreciated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The weakness of Hakluyt was that he never attempted any synthesis of the vast material at his disposal: Purchas, on the other hand, drew all his reading together in order to develop a single theme, a survey of the world from the point of view of its peoples and their religious practices. Christian Europe was excluded from his synthesis, since he purposed to make of it a separate study, and since it had already been written of by Edwin Sandys. The proposed European companion volume to the Pilgrimage was, however, never written, nor was the promised European section of the later Pilgrimes.

Seven hundred authors were drawn upon for the first edition of the Pilgrimage, which was ready for the press on 5 November 1612, and which exceeded in size the first edition of Hakluyt's Voyages. The labour involved, not merely that of transcription and arrangement as in Hakluyt's case, but of presenting a coherent and exactly documented narrative, must have been enormous, and could hardly have occupied less than a year. Purchas's friends came forward to assist him with the loan of books, and the freedom of their libraries. He was furnished by Captain Smith with the manuscript material which formed the basis of the Map and Description of Virginia of 1612 (979), and he personally interrogated young Henry Spelman, ‘Captain Argall's boy’, when he arrived home after the adventure of nearly a year's captivity among the Indians. This lad's narrative Purchas many years later published in full (936).

The seven hundred authors he had consulted are listed in alphabetical order, and afford interesting evidence of the books that a University man read in the early seventeenth century. A goodly proportion were, of course, the standard classics, while as each writer to be found in Ramusio's or Hakluyt's collections is mentioned separately, these make up several score of the names. Nevertheless, Purchas appears to have missed no contemporary work of importance, either English or continental, which had any bearing on his subject, and the list was increased to twelve hundred and then again to thirteen hundred names in subsequent editions of the Pilgrimage. Of the original seven hundred, only about one-fifth were English authors.

The dedication of the work was to George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose little World Geography (545) was so popular, and to him Purchas says: ‘Duty makes me bold even at my first looking and leaping out of the dungeon of obscurity which hitherto hath enclosed me, to interrupt your more serious affairs with a view of these my labours.’ His reward for ‘an enterprise never yet (to my knowledge)’, as he writes, ‘in any language attempted’ was an immediate Chaplaincy to the Archbishop, which was followed by a preferment to a London incumbency and the friendship of the patron, Bishop King. The value of the latter may be measured by the new rector's continued gratitude. ‘Let my name be ever forgotten,’ he wrote many years later, ‘if I remember not his, … my deceased patron Dr. King, late Lord Bishop of London, to whose bounty under God I willingly ascribe my life, delivered from a sickly habitation, and consequently (as also by opportunities of a London benefice), whatsoever additions in my later editions of my Pilgrimage.’ The ‘sickly habitation’ was perhaps the low-lying, unhealthy Essex vicarage, where he was far from bookshops and from libraries: the two later and enlarged editions of the Pilgrimage followed this preferment.

John Selden, a great lover of learning, graced the first edition with an epigram: ‘… At, Purchase, tui nova Corona jam circumdatur, endoque ore docto vivet nomen, honosque etc.’, while ‘J. W.’, a fellow Theologian, epitomized its plan and contents in a verse:

The Body of this Book is History
Clad in quaint garments of Geography
Adorned with Jewells of Chronology
Fetch'd from the Treasure of Antiquity
The better part thereof Theology
Soul of the world: Religious Piety
Adds life to all and gives Eternity.

The literary style of Purchas's period, with its redundance, its circumlocution, its excessive ornament, and its tolerance of the constant intrusion of an outward show of piety, is repellent to a modern reader. Nevertheless, the Pilgrimage is rich in vivid descriptive passages which it is tempting to quote at length, as, for example, the following account of Ceylon:

‘The heavens with their dews, the air with a pleasant wholesomeness and fragrant freshness, the waters in their many rivers and fountains, the earth diversified in aspiring hills, lowly vales, equal and indifferent plains, filled in her inward chambers with metals and jewels, in her outward court and upper face stored with whole woods of the best cinnamon that the sun seeth, besides fruits, oranges, lemons, & c., surmounting those of Spain; fowls and beasts both tame and wild (among which is their elephant, honoured by a natural acknowledgement of excellence, of all other elephants in the world): these all have conspired and joined in common league to present unto Cielan the chief of worldly treasures and pleasures. … No marvel then, if sense and sensuality have here stumbled on a Paradise. There woody hills, as a natural amphitheatre, do encompass a large plain: and one of them, as not contenting his beetle-brows with that only prospect, disdaineth also the fellowship of the neighbouring mountains, lifting up his head seven leagues in height.’

King James read and re-read the Pilgrimage as a bedside book, nor can it be forgotten that it was from Samuel Purchas that the dreaming Coleridge derived the inspiration for his most exquisite verse.

‘In Xanadu did Cublai Can’, so runs the prose original, ‘build a stately palace, encompassing sixteen miles of plain ground with a wall, wherein are fertile meadows, pleasant springs, delightful streams, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game. And in the midst there is a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place. … He hath a herd or drove of horses and mares, about ten thousand, as white as snow, of the milk whereof none may taste, except he be of the blood of Cengis Can. … According to the direction of his Astrologers or Magicians, he … spendeth and poureth forth with his own hands the milk of these mares in the air, and on the earth, to give drink to the spirits and idols which they worship, that they may preserve the men, women, beasts, birds, corn and other things growing on the earth.’

Purchas must take rank also as a pioneer among English writers of human and historical geography, for as he wrote and believed, ‘History without that so much neglected study of Geography is sick of a half dead palsy.’ Yet pure geography enthralled him, and as he naïvely confesses, for those pagan areas where there was comparatively little to say about the history of religion, he filled his chapters with geographical descriptions. These remain readable, even though the pages upon Turkish, Mohammedan and Jewish ritual and religious practices are too tedious for our day. But it must not be forgotten that the Jacobean reader was educated to delight in lengthy doctrinal discussions and the exposition of theology. He, therefore, attracted by the main subject matter of the book, found himself led unawares to the less popular geographical study, only to find that geography had an interest which manuals such as that of George Abbot had not prepared him to expect.

The immediate success of the Pilgrimage must have exceeded the author's highest hopes. Not merely did it win for him worldly preferment, but it attracted to him every one who felt able to add fresh narratives or manuscripts of voyages overseas to his store. What must have gratified him beyond all else was that Richard Hakluyt sought his acquaintance. Of his admiration for the author of the English Voyages the Essex parson had made no secret, and his debt to the older writer was acknowledged more than once in his printed pages. Hakluyt was now more than sixty years of age and, as it would seem, in failing health. Although he had continued to collect, perhaps almost in spite of himself, the manuscript records of voyages for trade and discovery, the probability that he would edit them for the press grew yearly more and more remote. Hence when he became aware of a young disciple in the full vigour of manhood, he saw in him a possible successor, and pressed on him the loan, and even the gift of valuable manuscripts. Purchas was invited to his chamber in Westminster to inspect his maps and other treasures, all of which he joyfully reports in the second and enlarged edition of the Pilgrimage which appeared in 1614.

Nor was Hakluyt his only new and influential friend. Sir Walter Ralegh came forward to supply him with more exact particulars of Guiana; Archbishop Ussher sent him a manuscript dealing with a heretical body of Christians; Sir Dudley Digges and Sir Thomas Smyth made him privy to the records of Hudson's voyages, with many others, to the north, and gave him access to the Archives of the East India Company. Purchas's summary of 1614 was consequently the first English printed account of Hudson's last fatal voyage: the first account also of the tragedy of the pinnace abandoned by Sir Francis Drake near Magellan's Strait, as related by Peter Carder (258). Far more frequently than in the first edition could the author now enrich his narrative with first-hand information. His friend and neighbour Andrew Battell dictated to him the story of his life among the natives of the Congo Basin, and in Portuguese Brazil (753); Thomas Turner related a like experience; Captain Salmon, returned to his home at Leigh after a voyage to East India, had a stirring tale to tell him of a sea-fight with the Portuguese. Another neighbour, John Vassal, had been in Barbary; Master Simons had lived among the Turks; Master Allan had searched the ruins of ancient Babylonia; John Pountesse had rowed in a little boat where once the walls of Carthage stood. Another personal friend, William Pursglove, had spent some time among the Samoyeds in north-east Russia, while Allen Sallow could give the parson direct information about James Hall's last voyage to the Arctic (948). The Pilgrim found occasion to mention each one of these men, if only in the margin of his text.

Purchas's manner of working and the help that he received on all hands can best be illustrated by quotation from the 1614 edition.

‘His [Henry Hudson's] last and fatal voyage was 1610, which I mentioned in my former edition, relating the same as Hesselius Gerardus had guided me by his card and reports. … But having since met with better instruction, both by the help of my painful friend Mr. Hakluyt [Margin:] (He communicated to me Hudson's abstract, Thos. Widdows', and Abakuk Pricket, of this voyage,) to whose labours these of mine are so much indebted, and specially from him who was the special setter forth of that voyage, that learned and industrious gentleman Sir Dudley Digges … I have been bold with the reader to insert this voyage more largely. In the year 1610, Sir Thomas Smith (let it not grieve thee, if here also I acknowledge a debt. Such are poor pilgrim's payments. And is not this he at whose forge and anvil have been hammered so many irons for Neptune? … Methinks I see here the stern that with little local steering guideth so many Ships to many of those ports which our Pilgrimage hath visited. …). [Margin:] (East Indies, Summer Islands, North and North-west Discoveries, Muscovia, & c. At his house are kept the courts, consultations, & c. I also have been beholden to him in this work.)’

Among the additional printed authorities to whom his attention was directed, perhaps by his friend Henry Briggs, were the great astronomers, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Galileo. The latter's discoveries by means of his telescope receive special mention, as bearing on the question of the heavenly firmament. ‘The number of the stars some have reckoned 1600, others 1022, and Tycho Brahe more. Galileo his glasses hath made them innumerable, in descrying infinite numbers otherwise not visible to us. … Yea, God himself propounds it to Abraham, as a thing impossible, to number them.’ There was in England, of course, at that time, no perception of any divorce between Science and Religion, and the Protestant Divine could quote freely from contemporary and classical philosophers, just as he could make free use of the abundant writings of the Jesuit Fathers, who were the main authorities for the geography of China, Japan and the Far East generally. Among Hakluyt's treasures which he displayed to Purchas were the great Jesuit map of China, brought home by Captain Saris from Bantam² in 1614, and the Mexican History in Pictures, with its English translation by Lok, both of which Purchas was afterwards to publish (376). A list of the names of between eighty and ninety ‘Manuscripts, Travellers, and other Authors not yet printed, here mentioned and followed’ was compiled by Purchas by these various means, and followed the enlarged list of printed authors in the second edition of the Pilgrimage. Practically all these manuscripts were published by him in his monumental Pilgrimes ten years later.

It would seem by Hakluyt's actions that he had intended to make Purchas his literary executor, but before his death in 1616, the two men were estranged, and for the third edition of the Pilgrimage (1617), so Purchas says, as contrasted with the second,

‘I could not obtain like kindness from him, I know not how affected, or infected, with emulation or jealousy, yet shall his name live while my writings indure. … And this is my epitaph in his memory, who had yet a better, his own large volumes being the best and truest titles of his House. And if some Juno Lucina would help to bring forth the Posthumous issue of his Voyages not yet published, the World should enjoy a more full testimony of his pains in that kind.’

Despite the estrangement between them, it can be inferred from Purchas's specific statement that he had been promised the eventual reversion of Hakluyt's papers. Speaking of the Mexican Picture History, long since translated by Lok, he says, ‘So it remained among his papers till his death, whereby (according to his last will in that kinde) I became the possessor thereof.’ Nevertheless, when Hakluyt's will was proved, there was no mention at all of his manuscripts, or of Samuel Purchas, and the latter was able to obtain possession of them only under ‘hard conditions’, presumably as a costly purchase from the executors. Judging, too, by certain expressions which Purchas makes use of in the Pilgrimes, the papers were in some confusion, as indeed might be expected. It was ten years and more since Hakluyt had been active in the pursuit of new knowledge. A reiteration of old arguments, a note or two written for his old friend Sir Thomas Smyth, some encouragement to a young translator, of such tasks he was still capable: but only to one like Purchas, who in his young manhood had feasted on his writings, did he any longer appear as a master, a leader of geographical thought.

Once in possession of the precious mass of journals, letters, notes, translations and maps, Purchas set to work upon that ‘Posthumous issue’, in which he was careful to exalt Hakluyt's name above his own. While he was planning this greater work heavy bereavement added to his cares. He lost his mother, his brother, and a little daughter, while the death of a brother-in-law made him responsible for the family that had been left without a head. This was in 1619, the occasion on which he wrote a work of piety, the Microcosmus, but by 1621 he was already sufficiently forward with the Pilgrimes to begin to send it piecemeal to the printer. By June 1622, the second, third, and fourth books were in type, and the author was at work on the fifth, the first being left until last. By New Year 1625, he was correcting the final pages, and adding the dedication of Volume II. The completed work had evidently originally been planned for publication in 1624, for this date appears on some copies of the engraved frontispiece. Material, however, continued to pour in, and the date was altered to 1625, when the two great volumes, each in two parts, finally appeared (1362). King James, to whom a copy was presented, commented on the absence of his favourite Pilgrimage, and when his death necessitated a second presentation to King Charles, the latter on receipt of the ‘voluminous twins’ (the reference is to the expected two volumes appearing each as two) requested that the earlier publication should be added to them. This was done in 1626, when Purchas took the opportunity to print as addenda two new and very valuable manuscripts, Sir Jerome Horsey's Russia (1376), and William Methwold's Relation of Golconda (1378).

Besides the geographical material left behind by Hakluyt, Purchas had his own collection of manuscripts, started before 1612, and he made application to the East India Company for leave to copy journals in their archives which he could not otherwise obtain. He did not propose, however, merely to print a new collection of voyages and travels, but once again to use the voyages and travels as raw material for a synthetic study. In this case his plan was one so grandiose as to be practically incapable of fulfilment. He set out to write a History of the World told through the medium of land and sea travel, and hence drew into his net an enormous amount of material, both English and foreign, that had already (and in many cases quite recently) been printed. No amount of editing, summarizing or digesting of this chaotic matter could reduce it to an ordered whole, developing a continuous theme. Certainly not in the hands of a single worker who could rarely bear to discard, and who had no help beyond that of his son even for the almost endless task of transcription. Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes was a double though a gallant failure. It was neither an authentic collection of well-edited historical documents, speaking for themselves, nor a geographical history of the world; nevertheless, it has served to preserve much that would inevitably have been lost had it never been written, and may best be described as an ‘omnibus’ book of giant proportions, in which every reader may find something to his taste.

The plan of the Pilgrimes was quite straightforward and logical. One volume was to be devoted to the Old World, and one to the New World, each volume to comprise ten books. Volume I opened with a general account of travel in Antiquity, and of the dawn of the Age of Discovery; this comprises Book I. Voyages of circumnavigation, which could be fitted into no regional scheme, occupy Book II, while voyages to East India and English intercourse with the Portuguese and Dutch fill Books III-IV. The second part of Volume I (i.e. its ‘twin’) commences with North Africa (Book VI), which is followed by Ethiopia (Book VII), the Holy Land and adjacent parts of Asia (Book VIII), the mainland of Asia (Book IX), and a miscellany of later accumulated material³ (Book X). The term ‘Old World’ is understood to mean, not Europe, Asia and Africa, but the world as known to the ancients. Hence Volume II, the New World, opens with Tartaria (Book I), and treats next of Japan, Corea and China (Book II), and then of the Arctic Regions (Book III). Journeys for discovery of a north or north-west Passage fill Book IV, and only in Book V is there a General Relation of America. Part II opens with the English voyages to America (Book VI), followed by detailed narratives of South America (Book VII), and the same of North America (Book VIII). Book IX is devoted to Virginia and the Summer Islands, Book X to the English Plantations in New England and Newfoundland.

Had Purchas kept strictly in view the presentation of a picture of the world, he might have compiled a shapely and readable pair of volumes. But he did not view his task objectively; he was by turns the preacher, the publicist, the patriot. There were things that Englishmen ought to know, things that Englishmen ought to do, things that Englishmen ought to read: his volumes had a didactic purpose, or rather many such purposes, and so became swollen, disproportionate, unbeautiful. Purchas the preacher peeps out already in the Preface to the Reader. To many young gentlemen ‘coming to their lands sooner than their wits’, he remarks, the now fashionable continental tour was a source of injury rather than of profit; habits of lighteness and frivolity, if not indeed looseness and impiety, were all they learned. Bishop Hall had censured such travel in his Quo vadis?, and to young gentlemen who were better travelling by their own fireside, as well as to their wiser elders who lacked opportunity to go abroad, ‘at no great charge I offer a world of Travellers to their domestic entertainment’.

Purchas the publicist is seen in Book V, to which he was adding when the English clash with the Dutch in the Indies was brought to a head by the Massacre of Amboyna. With Robert Hayes (just back from the scene of trouble) at his elbow, begging him to peruse scores of letters from the factors, and translating for him the relevant Dutch correspondence, he feels that the reader must have the subject presented to him from every possible angle.

‘Let none accuse me for tediousness (he writes), or being too punctual in this Relation [of Courthop's Journal], seeing the Dutch pestilence grew principally from thence: and hence may His Majesty's right to these Islands be known in future ages.’ ‘For the Reader's more full satisfaction in these affairs of Banda (the original of the Wars between the English and Hollanders in the Indies) I have reprinted three letters before published: as also the Declaration of the Hollanders in answer thereto: and the same refuted by certain Mariners.’

That is to say, he reprinted pamphlets that had scarcely left the English press when he was writing. He had even thoughts of reprinting Misselden's tract on Free Trade, with that of Digges, but the latter was abroad and Purchas feared to displease him.

‘For his ill-will I have cause to be unwilling to purchase, whose good will hath purchased mine and me (a worthless Purchas) in effecting my present good, in affecting greater: that I might have been enabled to have bestowed on the world my promised perfected World.’

Finally, Purchas the ardent advocate of colonial expansion appears, both indirectly, in the arrangement of the whole work to lead up to the story of the new Plantations, and directly, in his reproaches upon the national sluggishness.

‘All which [Spanish Relations] may be of use one day, when our Virginia Plantation (which blusheth to see so little done after eighteen years continued habitation, with so much cost, and so many lives and livelihoods spent thereon) shall lift up her head with more live alacrity, and shake her glorious locks, and disparkle her triumphant looks, throw the inland countries to the Westward Ocean. And indeed for Virginia's sake we have so long held you to Spanish discourses.’

The mention here of the Western Ocean beyond Virginia confirms the evidence from other sources that Purchas was still a firm believer in the theory that a river or other passage led through the Colony to the Pacific, ‘another Sea lying within sixe days' journey beyond them, into which other rivers descend’, as he writes at the close of Book X. He had, indeed, in 1619 or earlier, given detailed instructions to one of the colonists, Thomas Dermer,⁴ to make a search for a passage thereto on his behalf. Dermer's letter to him, relating his efforts and why he was obliged to leave the search unconcluded, is printed in the Pilgrimes.

Many harsh criticisms have been levelled at Purchas as an editor. It is true that he mutilated by his abridgements manuscripts that would to-day be of inestimable value if preserved in extenso, that he withheld maps and documents which the modern historian would dearly love to possess. But he was writing for his contemporaries, not for posterity. It was his duty neither to weary nor to offend them: it was his duty also, since he was handling private letters and journals, and confidential trade reports, to refrain from making public what ought to remain private: it was his duty, further, to avoid any exacerbation of the strained relations arising between the English and the Dutch. Finally he had to do his best with very limited funds.

That all these facts and factors influenced his work can be proved from his own notes. It was his earnest endeavour to be impartial towards all nations and all creeds:

‘For my part I honour virtue in a Spaniard, in a friar, in a Jesuit: and have in all this voluminous story not been more careful to show the evil acts of Spaniards, Portugals, Dutch, in quarrels between them and us, than to make known whatsoever good in them, when occasion offered.’

In the Greenland relations he softens down the English collisions with the Dutch, taking the view that they were expressions of individual, rather than national, ill will. So too, in the Indies, the Hollanders'

‘abuse of the English in those parts are here published for knowledge of the Eastern affairs and Occurrences, as it is meet in a history. And neither were these national, but personal crimes. … This history hath related the worth of many worthy Hollanders.’

Nor were, of course, all Englishmen blameless in their conduct abroad. The expurgation of private Journals was very necessary.

‘Of many misdemeanours’ (he says), ‘I permit some to pass the Press, that the cause of so many deaths in the Indies might be found rather to be imputed to their own than the Elements' distemper, and for a caveat to those who shall send or be sent into Ethnik regions. Yet do I conceal the most and worst.’

Again of Fletcher's Russe Commonwealth which he reprinted, he says: ‘I have in some places contracted, in others modified, the biting or more bitter style which the Author useth of the Russia Government, that I might do good at home, without harm abroad.’ And not merely had he to avoid giving offence to friendly nations: he had to guard against revealing trade secrets, or ‘mysteries of commerce’ as he terms them.

So far as the East India Company's records were concerned, his notes and transcripts were censored before he took them from their House, and he was obliged to go there personally to transcribe them, since the Company would not entrust confidential documents to a copyist. Only when the Pilgrimes were well advanced, in 1624, is there a record of permission being granted for Purchas to take a Journal away, that of Edward Monox, and he was required to give a receipt and fix a day for its return.

Even when he had satisfied the Honourable Company, a further censorship had to be undergone, that of the printer, who was liable to punishment if he printed any dangerous or seditious matter. In the New York of 1625, when the two pairs of twin volumes were complete, Purchas prepared a tract summarizing the injuries done to the Company's servants by the Dutch in the East Indies. This was read aloud to the Court, and revised in accordance with their suggestions, after which permission was given for it to be bound up with the Pilgrimes. The printer, however, having taken advice, refused to pass it for press, and although the Court deputed two gentlemen to reason with him, and to offer him a monetary payment, he remained obdurate, and the proposal had to lapse. The suggestion was made that the Company should have the pamphlet printed separately, but this does not seem to have been done. It is true that the Court Minutes of the East India Company, under date 6 July 1627, contain a record of one Edward Elrington approaching them for a gratuity ‘who hath lately translated Purchas's work into Latin, and therein inserted the bloody passages of the Dutch against the English at Amboyna’. But nothing more is known of Elrington's translation, except that he received £5 from the Poor-box, as a scholar ‘who has shown his desire to honour the Company by publishing their actions to the world’.

Another and quite different reason for Purchas's drastic editing was, of course, the fear of seeming tedious to his readers, and the knowledge that the work was rapidly becoming of inordinate length.

‘This Journal of Captain Keeling's and that of Captain Hawkins, written at sea leisure, very voluminous, in a hundred sheets of paper, I have been bold so to shorten as to express only the most necessary observations for sea and land affairs.’ ‘The Work could not but be voluminous,’ he says elsewhere, ‘having a World for a subject, and a world of witnesses for the evidence: and yet … these vast volumes are contracted and epitomized, that the nicer Reader be not cloyed.’

Many Journals and voyages actually prepared for press he was forced finally to omit through lack of space. Nor must mention be omitted of his own moral indignation as a censor.

‘Algier (writes Purchas) is the whirlpool of those seas, the throne of piracy, the sink of trade, the stink of slavery; the cage of unclean birds, the habitation of sea-devils, the receptacle of renegados to God and traitors to their country. … As for Ward and other English infesting the world of that hell mouth, I was loth to blot these papers with so rotten names.’⁵

Nevertheless, in spite of the great difficulties that faced him, and much drastic editing, Purchas has still preserved for us the ipsissima verba of many an obscure figure through whose means the past springs vividly to life. We could ill have spared, for example, Captain George Waymouth's terse relation of a mutiny at sea (649). He had reached latitude 68° 53′ N. in his search for the N.W. Passage when his men

‘bare up the helm, being all so bent, that there was no means to persuade them to the contrary. At last understanding of it, I came forth from my Cabin and demanded of them: Who bare up the Helm? They answered me: One and all! So they Hoysed up all the sail they could, and directed their course south and by west!’

Again, while rejecting the ‘whole elaborate poems’ which were the fruit of William Hely's pen in the lonely Arctic, Purchas printed in full the pitiful letter which the same man (who was Vice-Admiral of the whaling fleet) received there from his Captain:

‘Loving friend Master Hely, I kindly salute you, wishing health to you with the rest of your company. … With a heavy heart I write you the lamentable accident which happened here the 28th of June. Our shallops all out in chase, and myself asleep, my brother [Peter] having a shallop by the ship's side, spied a whale going into the Ice Bay, followed him and struck him; and his rope being new, ran out with kinks, which overthrew his shallop, where he lost his life with my boy Beldrake, being, as we think, carried away with the rope (the dearest whale to me that ever was struck in this harbour). There was never any loss, I think, went so near my heart.’

Purchas's own ear and heart were, as we must believe, quick to catch the authentic voice of Truth, wheresoever found. ‘I had rather have’, he wrote in the opening chapter of the Pilgrimes, ‘the meanest of Ulysses his followers relating his wanderings, than wander from certainty with Homer, after all his reading and conjectures.’

That so few original maps were published in connexion with the various narratives was due, not to his neglect, but to the high cost of having them specially engraved and printed: and the result has been a serious loss. Purchas states, for example:

‘This Map of the Author [William Baffin] for this and the former voyage, with the tables of his journal and sailing, were somewhat troublesome, and too costly to insert.’ And again: ‘If I had been able to give thee also those Draughts, Reader [i.e. Fitzherbert's new maps made in the Moluccas], thou shouldest have had them. But such as I have I give unto thee, namely this of Hondius, mean and obscure enough, but somewhat more than nothing. I had another far better sent me from the Indies; but partly the cost, and partly doubt to displease, have detained the publishing.’

The ‘doubt to displease’ is a reminder that it was not politic to give new and accurate charts to the world to help trade or personal rivals, and this explains why Thomas Dermer, in relating his North Virginian reconnaissance to his patron, adds: ‘I have drawn a plot of the coast, which I dare not yet part with.’

A close perusal of the Pilgrimes reveals the painstaking care with which Purchas sought for the best materials, and the time he spent in personal interviews with the participants in the various voyages when he could compass it. Now he is in private conference with Sir Thos. Dale on Virginia matters, now he is questioning Richard Jobson further about the Golden Trade, and adding incidentally an elephant's tail to his collection of curios. On another occasion he is presented with authentic Chinese paintings by Captain Saris,⁶ whose knowledge of the East was unrivalled. Again, to make certain of the authenticity of the story of the dripping tree of Ferro, related on hearsay by Sir Richard Hawkins, Purchas makes inquiry of Mr. Lewis Jackson, who was there in 1618, and in order to amplify his material on Japan he begs a personal relation from the Rev. Arthur Hatch, who complies in a letter dated 23 November 1623. Sometimes his efforts were unsuccessful, as when two of the men involved in the shipwreck of Captain Pring in China, after he had interrogated them, promised to write down their relation, but went back to the Indies leaving the promise unfulfilled. Others were, perhaps, over-generous with material. Correspondence reveals one such in John Sanderson, the old Levant merchant, Purchas's personal friend and the very willing contributor of his racy descriptions of Constantinople and the Holy Land. Thomas Button, the Arctic explorer, as well as William Baffin, went deeply with him into the more useful matter of a northern passage. A glimpse we have later of Button, now ‘Sir’ Thomas, turning over the Journals and papers that no one has been eager to examine since Purchas died, is a hint that the Parson was sorely missed.

Yet in spite of all his efforts, there appear to have been many individuals whom he could not please, many especially who reproached him with his failure to redeem his promise to write also a European Pilgrimage. He had not been unwilling,

‘But no man assisted the Pilgrim’, he explains with simple dignity, ‘which forced him to leave off. … Poverty clears me of perfidy. … My body is worn and old before and beyond my years: and to have borne so long two such burdens of pulpit and press … would perhaps have tired my quarrelsome plaintiff too: to have ascended the one (idque Londini) twice or thrice a week ordinarily, and descended the other with so frequent successions and long continuations.’

That he was worn and old before his time was no mere fashion of speech. The burden of translating, transcribing, editing, compiling and press-reading, had not long been lifted from his shoulders when he died—scarcely fifty years of age. He was buried on the last day of September 1626.

It may be that Samuel Purchas's reach exceeded his grasp, that his aspirations out-soared his abilities. But he was not less single-minded than Hakluyt himself, and only suffers by comparison with him as inevitably as James I must suffer when compared with Queen Elizabeth, or as any Jacobean must suffer when compared with any Elizabethan. The two men, although their deaths were but ten years apart, belonged each to a different Age.

Notes

1. Coryat, who left England in the autumn of 1612, sent greetings from Agra to ‘M. Samuel Purkas, the great collector of the Lucubrations of sundry classical authors for the description of Asia, Africa and America’. Purchas had given Coryat copies of Petrus Gyllius's works on the Thracian Bosphorus and Constantinople, which the recipient unregretfully lost (1101).

2. It had been intended to give this map to Prince Henry, but the latter died before the presentation could be made.

3. ‘All in this Book from the Tenth Chapter forward (enough to have made another large Book) thou hast as I could and not as I would; who could not order them before I had them.’

4. This ‘understanding and industrious gentleman’, as John Smith called him, died in 1621 of wounds inflicted by the Indians.

5. An amazing literature was inspired by the exploits of the pirates Ward and Dansker. See Nos. 824, 826-8, 851, 955.

6. Some of the pictures that Saris brought home gave great offence and were ordered to be burnt.