The best opportunity for studying the slight diversities of the different issues of this book may be found in the Lenox Library, which has ten copies, showing all the varieties. Among other copies, the following are noted:—
1624., Charles Deane. A large paper dedication copy of this edition, bound for Smith’s patron, the Duchess of Richmond and Lenox, was bought, at the Brinley Sale in 1879, no. 364, for the Lenox Library, $1,800. The Menzies and Barlow copies are also called large paper ones. See Griswold Catalogue, no. 778; Field’s Ind. Bibliog. no. 1435. The Huth Catalogue, p. 1367, gives a copy of this edition in the original rich binding, showing the arms of the Duke of Norfolk quartered with those of his wife, the daughter of the Duchess of Richmond and Lenox.
1626., Harvard College Library. Sparks’s Collection, now at Cornell University, no. 2424.
1627., Prince Library in Boston Public Library. Massachusetts Historical Society. See the Crowninshield Catalogue, no. 992.
1631., The Huth Catalogue, p. 1367, gives, perhaps by error, an edition of this date. I have noted no other copy.
1632., Harvard College Library.
The two portraits of the Duchess of Richmond and of Matoaka are usually wanting. See the note to chapter v. Average copies without the genuine portraits, which in Rich’s day (1832) were worth five guineas, are now valued at more than three times that sum. The portrait of Smith, which is shown reduced on the map of New England already given, has been similarly reproduced full size in the Memorial History of Boston, i., and is engraved in the Richmond edition of the Generall Historie, in Bancroft, Drake’s Boston, Hillard’s Life of Smith, N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., Jan. 1858, etc.
The Generall Historie, in conjunction with the True Travels, was carelessly reprinted at Richmond, in 1819, at the cost of the Rev. John Holt Rice, D.D., who lost by the speculation. (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1877, p. 114.) A large part appeared in Purchas’s Pilgrims, iv. 1838. It is given entire in Pinkerton’s Collections of Voyages, xiii.
It is the sixth book of this Generall Historie which relates to New England, and in this Smith supplements his own experience, and brings the details down beyond the limits of this present chapter, by borrowing from Mourt’s Relation and reporting upon other accounts, as he did in his still later publication, the tract called Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, which brings the story down to 1630.
Dr. Palfrey has a note on the confidence to be reposed in Smith’s books, in his History of New England, i. 89.