Introduction: Negotiating travel in the Anglo-American Atlantic world, 1550–1747

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the MIT Literature section and Dean Deborah Fitzgerald for their support of the seminar, and Jacqueline Breen and Brad Seawall for their invaluable assistance with its planning. Major funding for the seminar was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and gratefully acknowledged here; however, views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this issue do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. For her assistance in the editing of this issue, I would also like to thank Charletta Bullard.

Notes

1. More information on ‘English Encounters with the Americas, 1550-1610’, including a list of participants, can be found at http://web.mit.edu/neh/english_encounters/index.html.

2. Our three invited speakers were Nicolás Wey Gómez (early modern science); Joyce Lorimer (the history of colonial and indigenous South America); and Réginald Auger (archaeology in the Canadian Arctic).

3. See, for instance, Richard Eden: ‘… this ought to be considered for a general rule, that nearest unto the south partes of the world betwene the two Tropikes under ye Equinoctial or burning lyne, where the sunne is of greatest forse, is the chiefest place where gold is engendered’. ‘Rycharde Eden to the reader', in Eden, A treatyse of the newe India (London, 1553), n.p.

4. Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: why Columbus sailed south to the Indies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.

5. George Best, A True Discourse (London, 1578), in The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, ed. Richard Collinson [1869] (New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), 54.

6. See Neil L. Whitehead, ‘Introduction’ to Walter Ralegh, Discoverie of …Guiana (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 26ff.

7. I.S. MacLaren, ‘In consideration of the evolution of explorers and travellers into authors: a model’, Studies in Travel Writing 15, no. 3 (2011): 221-41 (227).

8. MacLaren cites the well-known case of Captain James Cook, whose travels were long known through the heavily edited narratives produced by John Douglas rather than through his own journals (‘In consideration', 229). Joyce Lorimer's recent edition of Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana (1596) for the Hakluyt Society traces Robert Cecil's intervention in the text, another example of a ‘single author’ text that in fact involves multiple hands. Joyce Lorimer, ed., Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana (London: The Hakluyt Society, 2006).