Samuel Purchas

Samuel Purchas (1575? - 1626), was an English travel writer, a near-contemporary of Richard Hakluyt.

Purchas was born at Thaxted, Essex, and graduated at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1600;^[1] 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 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. In 1613 he published the first volume of his Pilgrimes series. The last of these, Hakluytus Posthumus is a continuation of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations and was partly based on manuscripts left by Hakluyt.

The fourth edition of the Pilgrimage is usually catalogued as the fifth volume of the Pilgrimes, but the two works are essentially distinct. Purchas died in September or October 1626, according to some 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 sources of inspiration for the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As a note to Coleridge's poem explains, "In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.”"

Writings

• Purchas, his Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages, (1613)
• Purchas, his Pilgrim. Microcosmus, or the histories of Man. Relating the wonders of his Generation, vanities in his Degeneration, Necessity of his Regeneration, (1619)
• Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells, by Englishmen and others (4 vols.), (1625)

External links

• Digitized works by Samuel Purchas (20 volumes of Hakluytus Posthumus etc.)

References

• This article incorporates text from the article "Samuel Purchas" in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.