It will be observed that of this list of thirty-three publications for twenty-five years about one half is of foreign origin.
B. Hakluyt’s “Westerne Planting” and the Maine Historical Society.—The history of this manuscript, so far as known, is as follows:—
The family of Sir Peter Thomson (who died in 1770) possessed it, from whom Lord Valentia secured it, and this collector indorsed upon it “unpublished” and “extremely curious.” It subsequently is found in the hands of Mr. Henry Stevens, who put it into a public sale in London, May, 1854; and in the Catalogue (lot 474) it is called “a most important unpublished manuscript, 63 pages, closely and neatly written, in the original calf binding.” It brought £44, and passed into the Collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps. (Stevens’s Hist. and Geog. Notes, 1869, p. 20.) This gentleman began in 1837 to print privately a catalogue of his library, then kept at Middle Hill, Worcestershire, and continued the printing, sheet by sheet, and under no. 14097 this manuscript appears as “A Hakluyt Discourse.” In 1859 Sir Thomas bought Thirlestane House, Cheltenham, the seat of Lord Northwick, and hither he removed his vast collections of manuscripts and books, where they now are, in the possession of his heirs, Sir Thomas having died in 1872. They are open to inquirers under restrictions. See N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1873, p. 429.
The manuscript of the Westerne Planting is not thought to be in Hakluyt’s hand, though in a contemporary script; and the writing of it by Hakluyt seems to have been in progress during the summer of 1584, while its author was thirty-two years old. There is evidence that it existed in four or five copies,—of which the only one known at this day is the Phillipps copy,—one of which was for the queen, and all were made with the view of recommending the planting of Norumbega.
In 1867 Dr. Woods was commissioned by the Governor of Maine to procure in Europe material for the early history of the State, and the first fruit was the engaging of Dr. Kohl in the work, which subsequently assumed shape in his Discovery of Maine, and the second the procurement of this Hakluyt manuscript. Dr. Woods was engaged in preparing it for the press, when his health declined, and the labor was completed by Mr. Charles Deane, the book being published by the Maine Historical Society in 1877.
Under the auspices of this Society some important historical work has been done. Dr. Kohl’s book is the most elaborate summary yet made of the early explorations on our New England coast. The labors of Dr. Woods have been the subject of consideration in Dr. E. A. Park’s Life and Character of Leonard Woods, Andover, 1880, 52 pp., and in Dr. C. C. Everett’s notice in Me. Hist. Coll., viii. 481, and in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 15. The late George Folsom opened an important field of investigation in his Catalogue of Original Documents in the English Archives relating to the Early History of Maine, privately printed, New York, 1858, which covers the years 1601-1700, and is said to have been compiled for him by Mr. H. G. Somerby. See N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg.,1859, p. 262, and 1869, p. 481. Of the labors of William D. Williamson, the principal historian of the State, there is due record in the Historical Magazine, xiii. 265, May, 1868, and in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., i. 90. The Hon. William Willis, of whom there are accounts in the Maine Hist. Coll., vii. 473, and in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1873, p. 1, was for many years the president of the Society, and besides furnishing many communications, he issued a bibliography of Maine in Norton’s Literary Letter, no. 4, 1859, which was much enlarged in the Historical Magazine, xvii. 145, March, 1870. In connection with this subject the bibliography in Griffin’s History of the Press in Maine, 1872, deserves notice. There is in the Hist. Mag., Jan. 1868, an account of the Maine Historical Society and the historical investigations it has patronized.
A list of the charters and grants on the Maine coast is given in the Hist. Mag., March, 1870, p. 154. See in this connection S. F. Haven’s lecture in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Lowell Lectures.
DR. JOHN G. KOHL.
We are indebted for the photograph used by the engraver to Dr. Kohl’s successor in the librarianship of the Public Library at Bremen, Dr. Heinrich Bulthaupt. No name ranks higher than Kohl’s in the investigations of our early North American geography. “From my childhood,” he says, “I was highly interested in geographical researches in connection with history.” Having gathered much material on the early cartographical history of America in the archives and libraries of Europe, he came to this country, and receiving an appropriation from Congress to enable him to make copies of his maps for the Government, he undertook that work, the results of which are now in the State Department at Washington. All that he desired to do was not provided for by the order of Congress, and he returned to Europe disappointed in his hopes, but leaving behind him, besides the collections in Washington, a memoir with maps on the discovery of the western coast of America, which is now in the library of the American Antiquarian Society. In Europe he annotated and published at Munich in fac-simile the two oldest general maps of America, those known as Ribero’s and Ferdinando Columbus’s, and a treatise on the history of the Gulf Stream, as well as a condensed popular history of the discovery of America. In 1868 he undertook, what proved to be his chief contribution to American historical geography, his Discovery of Maine. He did not feel that he had accomplished all in this that he would; but it still remains the most important essay since Humboldt in that peculiar field. See Charles Deane’s notice of Kohl in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Dec. 1878, and the memoir in the Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, Augsburg, July 9, 1879.