- Samuel Purchas
Samuel Purchas (1575? - 1626), was an English travel writer, a near-contemporary of
Richard Hakluyt .Purchas was born at
Thaxted , Essex, and graduated atSt John's College, Cambridge , in 1600; later he became B.D., and was admitted at Oxford in 1615. In 1604 he was presented by James I to the vicarage ofEastwood, Essex , and in 1614 became chaplain toArchbishop George Abbot and rector ofSt Martin, Ludgate ,London . He had previously spent much time in London on his geographical work. In 1613 he published the first volume of his "Pilgrimes" series. The last of these, "Hakluytus Posthumus" is a continuation of Hakluyt's "Principal Navigations" and was partly based on manuscripts left by Hakluyt.The fourth edition of the "Pilgrimage" 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.
"Purchas his Pilgrimage" was one of the sources of inspiration for the poem "
Kubla Khan " bySamuel 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 PilgrWritings
*"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)References
*1911|article=Samuel Purchas|url=http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Samuel_Purchas
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