Samuel Purchas

Title page of Samuel Purchas's magnum opus: Purchas his Pilgrimes, London, 1625

Memorial tablet to Purchas in Bristol Cathedral

Samuel Purchas (1575? – 1626), was an English cleric who published several volumes of reports by travelers to foreign countries.

Purchas was born at Thaxted, Essex, and graduated at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1600. In 1604 he was presented by James I to the vicarage of St. Laurence and All Saints, Eastwood, Essex, and in 1614 became chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot and rector of St Martin, Ludgate, London. He held a Bachelor of Divinity degree, and with this degree was admitted at Oxford University in 1615.

In 1613 he published Purchas his Pilgrimage: or Relations of the world and the religions observed in all ages and places discovered, from the creation unto this present. In this work, intended as an overview of the diversity of God's creation from an Anglican world view, he presented several abbreviated travel stories he would later publish in full.

In 1625 he published Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, a massive four-volume collection of travel stories that can be seen as a continuation of Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations and was partly based on manuscripts left by Hakluyt, who had died in 1616.

The fourth edition of the Pilgrimage (published in 1624) 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. His editorial decisions as well as the commentary he added can be understood from his basic goal: to edify and educate the reader about the world, foreign culture, and morality. This should be contrasted with Hakluyt's goal of inspiring and interesting the nation in pursuing the project 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). Reprinted in 1905-1907 in 20 volumes.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Samuel Purchas". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Samuel_Purchas. 

External links

• Digitized works by Samuel Purchas (20 volumes of Hakluytus Posthumus etc.)
• Purchas his Pilgrimage, digital images of all four volumes, Library of Congress
•  "Purchas, Samuel". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900.