Samuel Purchas
Anglican cleric Samuel Purchas (c. 1577 – 1626 published several volumes of reports by travellers to foreign countries.
After he graduated from St John's College, Cambridge, in 1600, Purchas became the vicar of a Thames-side parish in Eastwood, Essex, where he recorded personal narratives from returning sailors and added them to a vast compilation of unsorted manuscripts he inherited from Richard Hakluyt.
After moving from Eastwood in 1614, Purchas served as Archbishop George Abbot's chaplain and rector of St Martin's, Ludgate, in London.
His principal works were Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World in all Ages (1613), Purchas his Pilgrim: Microcosmus, or the History of Man (1619) and Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), based on Hakluyt's papers and the original East India company's archives.
This last collection is often the sole source of detail on early explorers' journeys and subsequently provided the basis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan:
"In Xaindu did Cublai Can build a stately palace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile meddowes, pleasant springs, delightful streams, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure."
Links to add:
Richard Hakluyt
Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
