A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 02

Kerr, Robert, 1755-1813Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
1.3M words
Chapters
127

Tags

English Originals World History Human GeographyHistorical ReappraisalAdventure TaleTravel GuideDocumentary NarrativeEclectic ReadingExotic CultureCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 02 by Robert KerrAuthor: Kerr, Robert, 1755-1813,Language: English, Class: G: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation, Release Date: Jan 1, 2004

Editor's review

A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 02 is the second volume of a compilation of voyage and travel documents edited by Robert Kerr and belongs to the public-domain literature of geography and travel. Kerr was a Scottish author of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and his editorial work is characterized by the gathering of historical travel records. The value of this book lies not in a single author's original narrative but in its arrangement of voyages, travels, and geographical observations drawn from multiple sources, offering readers a documentary window into premodern travel writing and geographical knowledge. As a Project Gutenberg ebook, it is easy to search and cite and suitable as supplementary material for research in historical geography, travel literature, or the history of colonial expansion. Readers should keep its compilational nature in mind: the sections vary in source and format, and the information must be assessed in light of historical context; it is not meant to be read straight through as a continuous narrative. For general readers, the book is better suited to selective reading by topic than to sequential reading from beginning to end.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. First consult the table of contents and the sources of the sections, and read selectively by region or voyage of interest rather than straight through.
  2. While reading, consult historical maps or place-name reference works to reduce difficulties caused by old-fashioned geographical descriptions.
  3. Record the source and narrative standpoint of each section so as to distinguish the reliability of different compiled materials.
  4. Read it alongside other works on maritime history, using the book as a source of documentary leads rather than as a conclusive narrative.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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  55. 55
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FAQ

Is this book Kerr's own travel record? No. This book is a compilation of voyage and travel documents edited by Robert Kerr; its contents gather historical travel records from multiple sources rather than the author's personal travel observations. Readers should attend to differences in the source and format of each section and use it as a collection of materials, not as a single author's continuous travelogue.
Can readers without a background in historical geography read this book? They can read selectively, but there will be some obstacles. The book involves old place names, historical routes, and premodern geographical descriptions, and readers without background knowledge may easily get lost. It is advisable to start with regions or voyages in the table of contents that are more familiar and to have historical maps or place-name reference works at hand.
What kind of reading approach suits this compilation? It suits searching and selective reading by topic rather than reading straight through. Readers can first look at the table of contents to identify voyages or regions of interest, then read the relevant sections, while noting the source and narrative standpoint of each. As research support material, its value lies in providing documentary leads and original accounts.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Kerr, Robert, 1755-1813 Author

Kerr, Robert (1755-1813) is an author included in the Chinese book database, whose biographical details remain limited in publicly available sources; what can be confirmed is that he left seventeen works. The representative works in the database center on the multi-volume series A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, covering several volumes from Volume 01 to Volume 15 and dealing with compilations of voyages, travel, and geographical exploration. Such works typically organize records of long-distance voyages and accounts of foreign lands across the ages, with narration leaning toward the retelling of historical sources and descriptions of journeys, and they bear a strong documentary and compilatory character. In the database's classification, his works fall under inspirational growth, which may relate to a reading orientation toward exploring the unknown and broadening one's horizons. Overall, he appears more a compiler than an original narrator, and his contribution lies in gathering scattered voyage and travel literature into collected volumes, making it easier for readers to understand early world transport and geographical knowledge.