Concerned chiefly with Mexico and Peru. With introduction and notes. The main pagination of this and the following volume (First Series 61) is continuous. This is a new print-on-demand hardback editio
In 1880, the Royal Geographical Society commissioned Sir Clements R. Markham, a noted British geographer and the Society's secretary, to write a history of its formation, and of the many expeditions it had supported since 1830, to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Published in 1881, The Fifty Years' Work of the Royal Geographical Society consists of twelve chapters. The first five are a condensed history of the original group of geographers who called themselves the Raleigh Club, and the events leading up to the Society's official formation. Chapters 6 and 7 recount the activities of past presidents, secretaries and leading members of the Society, with the rest of the book detailing the fascinating scientific expeditions the Society sponsored financially from the Arctic to Antarctica, the explorers who took part in them, and the various publications the Society published to advance natural science and exploration.
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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) was an Italian explorer who became a controversial figure. He made several voyages to South America between 1499 and 1502, and wrote accounts of these voyages to his patron. However the publication of two letters with outrageous claims attributed to him in 1502 and 1504 brought accusations that Vespucci was attempting to undermine Christopher Columbus' fame. These letters, together with other contemporary documents, are published in this volume to allow an independent judgement to be made on these claims.
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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India.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 1881 volume contains accounts by William Baffin (1584–1622) and others of Baffin's voyages exploring the coasts of Greenland and Spitsbergen, and his search for the North-West Passage. Although he did not find a route east, he got considerably further north than previous navigators, and provided much useful information on the conditions and natural resources of the area. His meticulous chart making and record keeping, and his use of lunar observations to calculate longitude, were groundbreaking and remarkably accurate, as later explorers found.
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 sixteenth-century autobiographical narrative, translated in 1862 from a manuscript in the National Library of Madrid and interspersed with contemporary letters, is a self-justificatory account of the adventures of an impecunious Spanish nobleman whose efforts to make a fortune took him all round Europe and eventually to Peru, where he witnessed the feud between Pizarro and Almagro which had lasting consequences for the future of South America. An introductory essay places this account in the context of other histories of the Spanish conquest.
First published in 1876, this volume contains first-hand accounts of the first voyages to Tibet by British diplomat George Bogle (1747–1781) and scholar Thomas Manning (1772–1840) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1774 Bogle was appointed the leader of the first British diplomatic mission to the previously unknown country of Tibet in an attempt to establish friendly relations and open trade links between the two countries. Bogle spent six months wintering in various places in Tibet, exploring Tibetan culture and politics. Thomas Manning became the first English national to enter the city of Lhasa and to speak with the Dalai Lama in 1811. Edited by prolific writer and president of the Royal Geographical Society Sir Clements Markham (1830–1916), this fascinating volume also includes a detailed introduction providing the historical and geographic context of the voyages, together with biographies of the two adventurers.
