Samuel Purchas | Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1625 [and] Purchas His Pilgrimage. 1626, 5 volumes in all

Samuel Purchas.

Purchas his Pilgrimes. In five books... London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625 [bound with:]

Purchas his Pilgrimage... In foure parts... The fourth Edition, much enlarged... London: William Stansby for Henry Fetherstone, 1626

5 volumes, folio (332 x 212 mm), letterpress title-page in each volume, engraved additional title-page ("Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes... 1625") bound at start of Pilgrimage, 7 double-page or folding maps (comprising: vol.1: map of the Mongol Empire after p. 578; vol.3: map of China after p. 400; map of Greenland after p. 472; map of America after p. 852; vol.4: map of Virginia after p. 1690; map of Canada after p. 1872; vol.5: map of China after p. 436), eighteenth-century mottled calf, some dampstaining at lower margins of each volume, the odd bit of marginal worming, rebacked, extremities rubbed, third and fourth volumes lacking lettering pieces

FIRST EDITION, INCLUDING THE IMPORTANT MAP OF VIRGINIA, with fourth edition of the Pilgrimage as issued. "One of the fullest and most important collections of voyages and travels in the English language" (Church), compiling narratives from antiquity through the up-to-date accounts of John Smith. The work was a continuation of Hakluyt who left a large collection of manuscripts which came into the hands of Samuel Purchas (c. 1577-1626) in about 1620. The work took more than three years to print, and was the largest book published on an English press to that time. Purchas edited oral accounts and manuscripts, translated texts in classical and foreign languages, and reprinted previously published works. His only original contributions came in the form of various editorials scattered through the volumes on, among other things, Solomon's voyage to Ophir, Pope Alexander's bulls of donation of 1493, the "iniquitie" of papal power, the history of Europe, and "Virginia's Verger," an ideological justification for English settlement in Virginia in the wake of the Powhatan uprising of 1622 (Pilgrimes, 4.1809-26). Though his editorial methods are often compared unfavorably with Hakluyt's, his work was probably more influential and more widely read.

PROVENANCE:

Bookplates of Thomas John Lloyd Baker (1777-1841) and Granville Edwin Lloyd Baker (1841-1924)

LITERATURE:

Church 401A; ESTC 20509 & 20508.5; Sabin 66682-86