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This collection of voyages has been made from some of those many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books of travel that are no longer easily to be found. The Elizabethan voyages and the more famous later travellers have often been reprinted, and most public libraries can supply Hakluyt and Purchas, Dampier, Anson and Cook. The big eighteenth-century collections, however, have not found modern publishers, and it is not likely that they ever will, for they are inordinately long and their hundreds of maps and engravings would be far too costly to reproduce.

Nearly all these collections (and there were dozens of them) were designed to give a view of the known world: they were intended to act as a kind of encyclopaedic geography, and the voyages were often constrained to suit the system. The result of this treatment was undoubtedly useful at the time, but a determined editor would often mangle an interesting voyage cruelly, extracting commercial and geographical facts and relating them in a uniformly dull manner. A melancholy example was the Abbé Prevost, whose Histoire Générale des Voyages fills some twenty insipid quartos.

Of these collections perhaps the most enjoyable is that called Churchill’s. It is an anonymously compiled work published in four handsome folio volumes by A. and J. Churchill in 1704; they brought out another edition in six volumes in 1732 and lastly an eight-volume edition in 1752. Churchill has the virtue of being the least systematic of the collections; when the original voyage is in English Churchill’s editor leaves his author alone, or at the most makes no alteration more ambitious than modernizing the spelling, which is hardly offensive at this length of time. Churchill had access to several manuscripts, the most important being that of Sir William Monson’s Naval Tracts, and he appears to have printed them with scholarly accuracy.

Most of the collections use much the same material, but as Churchill shows most respect for his authors, I have used him as the main provider for this book, though I have gone to the original wherever there has been an earlier printed version.

The text is integral in the case of the complete voyages; I have given it exactly as I found it, down to the last inconsistency in spelling. The extracts have been edited, but the editing has been confined to excision, and every cut, except in Lady Craven’s journey, is shown. There are no footnotes except those of the original authors. Editor’s footnotes seem to me out of place in a work of this kind; they spoil the impression of reading the original text, they ruin the appearance of a page, and if they tell you anything new it is often annoyingly trivial. The only notes are short biographical and bibliographical remarks at the beginning of the accounts, and a list of sea-terms, taken from various eighteenth-century sources, at the end of the book.

Most books of voyages say in their prefaces that they intend to be useful. “Let us have no unnecessary ornamentation at the outset of a work in which we propose nothing but the weighty and the useful,” begins one; they hardly ever speak of giving entertainment.

The intention of this book is quite different; its first aim is to give the reader pleasure. It makes no claim to being a scholarly work, and it has no didactic purpose. If the reader draws instruction or edification from it as well as pleasure that is his own affair, and beside the bargain.

PATRICK O’BRIAN.