Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen

Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen Synopsis

Excerpt from Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen: Select Narratives From the 'Principle Navigations' of Hakluyt

IN the present edition, the two volumes of Mr Payne's original selection (first published in 1880; second edition 1893, 1900) have been condensed into one by the omission of the melancholy, almost disgraceful, last voyage and last letter of Thomas Cavendish, as well as of Raleigh's dreary and 'philomythic Discovery of Guiana, and of the introductory matter relating to these texts. Here at least the reader will no longer have to wade through the unworthy recriminations of Elizabethan heroes turned by misfortune into scolds, forgetful of dignity and truth; nor will he any longer be obliged to study the nature of the headless Ewai panoma' of Raleigh's anonymous friend and 'most honest man of his word To have lost our record of the miraculous virtues of the Armadillo, a preservative against poison 'as sovereign as any unicorn's horn is perhaps a calamity but who will lament the absence of those terrible and endless names of Indian towns, tribes, and chiefs with which Sir Walter pelts us in his Dz'scovery - Orenoqueponi, Arraroopana, Toparimaca, Marinatambal, Macureguarai, and the like? Romance is good; but a hundred pages of El Dorado and its neighbours is too long a spell away from terrafirma, if our object is to learn, as we may from all the narratives we have left in this series, the truth and fact Of English expansion in the great days of Elizabeth.

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