The Abbé de la Porte’s Voyageur François, in forty-two volumes, 1765-1795 (there are other dates), may be mentioned to warn the student of its historical warp with a fictitious woof.[243] John Barrows’ Collection of Voyages (London, 1765), in three small volumes, was translated into French by Targe under the title of Abrégé chronologique. John Callender’s Voyages to the Terra australis (London, 1766-1788), three volumes, translated for the first time a number of the narratives in De Bry, Hulsius, and Thevenot. It gives the voyages of Vespucius, Magellan, Drake, Galle, Cavendish, Hawkins, and others.[244] Dodsley’s Compendium of Voyages was published in the same year (1766) in seven volumes.[245] The New Collection of Voyages, generally referred to as Knox’s, from the publisher’s name, appeared in seven volumes in 1767, the first three volumes covering American explorations.[246] In 1770 Edward Cavendish Drake’s New Universal Collection of Voyages was published at London. The narratives are concise, and of a very popular character.[247] David Henry, a magazinist of the day, published in 1773-1774 An Historical Account of all the Voyages Round the World by English Navigators, beginning with Drake and Cavendish.[248]
La Harpe issued in Paris, 1780-1801, in thirty-two volumes,—Comeyras editing the last eleven,—his Abrégé de l’histoire générale des voyages, which proved a more readable and popular book than Prévost’s collection. There have been later editions and continuations.[249]
Johann Reinhold Forster made a positive contribution to this field of compilation when he printed his Geschichte der Entdeckungen und Schifffahrten im Norden at Frankfort in 1785.[250] He goes back to the earliest explorations, and considers the credibility of the Zeno narrative. He starts with Gomez for the Spanish section. A French collection by Berenger, Voyages faits autour du monde (Paris, 1788-1789), is very scant on Magellan, Drake, and Cavendish. A collection was published in London (1789) by Richardson on the voyages of the Portuguese and Spaniards during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Mavor’s Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries (London, 1796-1802), twenty-five volumes, is a condensed treatment, which passed to other editions in 1810 and 1813-1815.
A standard compilation appeared in John Pinkerton’s General Collection of Voyages (London, 1808-1814), in seventeen volumes,[251] with over two hundred maps and plates, repeating the essential English narratives of earlier collections, and translating those from foreign languages afresh, preserving largely the language of the explorers. Pinkerton, as an editor, was learned, but somewhat pedantic and over-confident; and a certain agglutinizing habit indicates a process of amassment rather than of selection and assimilation. Volumes xii., xiii., and xiv. are given to America; but the operations of the Spaniards on the main, and particularly on the Pacific coast of North America, are rather scantily chronicled.[252]
In 1808 was begun, under the supervision of Malte-Brun and others, the well-known Annales des voyages, which was continued to 1815, making twenty-five volumes. A new series, Nouvelles annales des voyages, was begun in 1819. The whole work is an important gathering of original sources and learned comment, and is in considerable part devoted to America. A French Collection abrégée des voyages, by Bancarel, appeared in Paris in 1808-1809, in twelve volumes.
The Collection of the best Voyages and Travels, compiled by Robert Kerr, and published in Edinburgh in 1811-1824, in eighteen octavo volumes, is a useful one, though the scheme was not wholly carried out. It includes an historical essay on the progress of navigation and discovery by W. Stevenson. It also includes among others the Northmen and Zeni voyages, the travels of Marco Polo and Galvano, the African discoveries of the Portuguese. The voyages of Columbus and his successors begin in vol. iii.; and the narratives of these voyages are continued through vol. vi., though those of Drake, Cavendish, Hawkins, Davis, Magellan, and others come later in the series.
The Histoire générale des voyages, undertaken by C. A. Walkenaer in 1826, was stopped in 1831, after twenty-one octavos had been printed, without exhausting the African portion.
The early Dutch voyages are commemorated in Bennet and Wijk’s Nederlandsche Ontdekkingen in America, etc., which was issued at Utrecht in 1827,[253] and in their Nederlandsche Zeereizen, printed at Dordrecht in 1828-1830, in five volumes octavo. It contains Linschoten, Hudson, etc.
Albert Montémont’s Bibliothèque universelle des voyages was published in Paris, 1833-1836, in forty-six volumes.
G. A. Wimmer’s Die Enthüllung des Erdkreises (Vienna, 1834), five volumes octavo, is a general summary, which gives in the last two volumes the voyages to America and to the South Seas.[254]