Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen

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Excerpt from Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen: Select Narratives From the Principal 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 Discovery - 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 terra firrna, 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.