"Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage" by Richard Hakluyt. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe is an interdisciplinary collection of 24 essays which brings together leading international scholarship on Hakluyt and his work. Best known as editor of The Principal Navigations (1589; expanded 1598-1600), Hakluyt was a key figure in promoting English colonial and commercial expansion in the early modern period. He also translated major European travel texts, championed English settlement in North America, and promoted global trade and exploration via a Northeast and Northwest Passage. His work spanned every area of English activity and aspiration, from Muscovy to America, from Africa to the Near East, and India to China and Japan, providing up-to-date information and establishing an ideological framework for English rivalries with Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands. This volume resituates Hakluyt in the political, economic, and intellectual context of his time. The genre of the travel collection to which he contributed emerged from Continental humanist literary culture. Hakluyt adapted this tradition for nationalistic purposes by locating a purported history of 'English' enterprise that stretched as far back as he could go in recovering antiquarian records. The essays in this collection advance the study of Hakluyt's literary and historical resources, his international connections, and his rhetorical and editorial practice. The volume is divided into 5 sections: 'Hakluyt's Contexts'; 'Early Modern Travel Writing Collections'; 'Editorial Practice'; 'Allegiances and Ideologies: Politics, Religion, Nation'; and 'Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing'. The volume concludes with an account of the formation and ethos of the Hakluyt Society, founded in 1846, which has continued his project to edit travel accounts of trade, exploration, and adventure.

Utopias have long interested scholars of the intellectual and literary history of the early modern period. From the time of Thomas More's Utopia (1516), fictional utopias were indebted to contemporary travel narratives, with which they shared interests in physical and metaphorical journeys, processes of exploration and discovery, encounters with new peoples, and exchange between cultures. Travel writers, too, turned to utopian discourses to describe the new worlds and societies they encountered. Both utopia and travel writing came to involve a process of reflection upon their authors' societies and cultures, as well as representations of new and different worlds. As awareness of early modern encounters with new worlds moves beyond the Atlantic World to consider exploration and travel, piracy and cultural exchange throughout the globe, an assessment of the mutual indebtedness of these genres, as well as an introduction to their development, is needed. New Worlds Reflected provides a significant contribution both to the history of utopian literature and travel, and to the wider cultural and intellectual history of the time, assembling original essays from scholars interested in representations of the globe and new and ideal worlds in the period from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and in the imaginative reciprocal responsiveness of utopian and travel writing. Together these essays underline the mutual indebtedness of travel and utopia in the early modern period, and highlight the rich variety of ways in which writers made use of the prospect of new and ideal worlds. New Worlds Reflected showcases new work in the fields of early modern utopian and global studies and will appeal to all scholars interested in such questions.

This book tracks the progress of a four hundred year effort to map the coasts of North America after 1492. A set of maps show the progression of exploration over time, and narratives of the voyages illustrate the trials and dangers faced by the men as they made their maps.

With our access to Google Maps, Global Positioning Systems, and Atlases that cover all regions and terrains and tell us precisely how to get from one place to another, we tend to forget there was ever a time when the world was unknown and uncharted--a mystery waiting to be solved. In On the Edge, Roger McCoy tells the captivating--and often harrowing--story of the 400 year effort to map North America's Coasts. Much of the book is based on the narratives of mariners who sought a passage through the continent to Asia and produced maps as a byproduct of their journeys. These courageous explorers had to rely on the most rudimentary mapping tools and to contend with unimaginably harsh conditions: ship-crushing ice floes; the threat of frostbite, scurvy, and starvation; gold fever and mutiny; ice that could lock them in for months on end; and, inevitably, the failure to find the elusive Northwest passage. Telling the story from the explorers' perspective, McCoy allows readers to see how maps of their voyages were made and why they were so full of errors, as well as how they gradually acquired greater accuracy, especially after the longitude problem was solved. On the Edge tracks the dramatic voyages of John Cabot, John Davis, Captain Cook, Henry Hudson, Martin Frobisher, John Franklin (who nearly starved to death and become known in England as "the man who ate his boots"), and others, concluding with Robert Peary, Otto Sverdrup, and Vihjalmur Steffanson in the early twentieth century. Drawing upon diaries, journals, and other primary sources--and including a set of maps charting the progress of exploration over time--On the Edge shows exactly how we came to know the shape of our continent.