The first edition of the Pilgrimes together with the fourth and best edition of the Pilgrimage, here in its first issue with a variant reading on the title ("unto this Present. In foure parts") and with the first leaf of the dedicatory epistle to Archbishop George Abbot mis-signed A2. This fourth edition of the Pilgrimage forms the fifth, or supplementary, volume to the Pilgrimes. The present copy is illustrated with many extra plates, often from the original editions of the texts, which are here translated into English. This extra illustrated copy undoubtedly is one of the finest copies of one of the greatest of English travel books.
Samuel Purchas (ca. 1577-1626), was an English clergyman and compiler of travel literature, a near-contemporary of Richard Hakluyt (1553-1616). Purchas was born at Thaxted, Essex, and graduated at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1600; later he became B.D., and was admitted at Oxford in 1615. In 1604, he was presented by James I to the vicarage of Eastwood, Essex, and in 1614 he became chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot and rector of St Martin, Ludgate, London.
He had previously spent much time in London on his geographical work. The original design of his work Purchas his pilgrimage (1613), was as a survey of peoples of the world and their religions. But such was its success that he expanded it into his famous compilation of travel literature: Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas his pilgrims (1625) for which he used the papers of Richard Hakluyt, East India Company records, as well as other manuscript material. Purchas' work is in fact a continuation and enlargement of Hakluyt's The principal navigations and was widely used as a source for information about foreign lands and cultures by natural philosophers.
The fourth edition of the Pilgrimage is usually catalogued as the fifth volume of the Pilgrimes (as it is here), but the two works are essentially distinct. Purchas died in September or October 1626, according to some sources in a debtors' prison. None of his works was reprinted till the Glasgow reissue of the Pilgrimes in 1905-1907. As an editor and compiler Purchas was often injudicious, careless and even unfaithful; but his collections contain much of value, and are frequently the only sources of information upon important questions affecting the history of exploration. Purchas his pilgrimage was one of the main sources of inspiration for many writers. From Milton to Coleridge (cf. the poem Kubla Khan) and Thoreau, and onwards to the 20th century, scholars have made use of these great volumes, which have served to spread geographical, political, and economic knowledge of foreign lands in the English tongue, to mould English attitudes to foreigners and to inspire poets.
Purchas followed the general plan of Hakluyt, but he frequently put the accounts in his own words. The main divisions of the work fall into two parts: the first covering the world known to Ptolemy, the second continuing the descriptions to Purchas' own day. The collection includes the accounts of Cortés, Magellan, Van Noort, Spilbergen, and Barents, as well as the various Portuguese voyages to the East Indies, Jesuit voyages to China and Japan, East India Company voyages, and the expeditions of the Muscovy Company.
Very good copies of this great work from the library of the Earls of Macclesfield (Shirburn Castle), with the book plates of the North Library. All of the folding maps and charts have been backed on linen. Ad 2 with a manuscript owner's inscription in black ink on the title-page: "Ex lib. Roberti Gray, Colleg. med. Lond. et Edinburg socii. 1700". Overall in very good condition. Howgego P163; L.E. Pennington (ed.), The Purchas handbook: studies of the life, times and writings of Samuel Purchas 1577-1626 (London, 1997. Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, no. 185-186), esp. the bibliography by Pamela Neville-Sington in vol. 2, pp. 465ff. Ad 1: Borba de Moraes, pp. 692-693; Church 401A; Hill, p. 243; Sabin 66683-66686; Ad 2: Sabin 66682.