Cambridge Library Collection - Hakluyt First Series

Cover of Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia; Expressing the Cosmographie and Comodities of the Country, Together with the Manners and Customes of the People

Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia; Expressing the Cosmographie and Comodities of the Country, Together with the Manners and Customes of the People

by William Strachey

Published 4 March 2010

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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. Volume 6 (1849) is the first published edition of a collection of manuscript records gathered by William Strachey (1572?-1621), the first Secretary of the English colony of Virginia. It includes Strachey's own account of a shipwreck, which is believed by some scholars to have inspired passages in Shakespeare's The Tempest, and a list of words in Powhatan which is the only source of information about that language apart from the account of Captain John Smith.