A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels - Volume 05

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

Rating 3.4
Word count
1.3M words
Chapters
128

Tags

English Originals World HistoryTravel DiscoveryTravelogueMaritime ExplorationExpeditionTravel GuideWorld OrderExotic CultureColonial EraCross-Cultural ViewLocal Customs

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 05 by Robert KerrAuthor: Kerr, Robert, 1755-1813,Language: English, Class: G: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation, Release Date: Feb 8, 2005

Editor's review

This book is Volume 5 of Robert Kerr's A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, part of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European tradition of compiling voyage and travel literature. Kerr was an Edinburgh bookseller and multi-volume historical compiler; such collections typically gather accounts by numerous voyagers and travelers, arranged by region or chronology, offering readers the geographical knowledge and observations about the world held by Europeans of the time. Volume 5 follows the overall format of the collection and is suitable as an entry point for consulting specific voyages or regional accounts rather than as linear narrative reading. Its value lies in presenting the organizational methods and narrative tone of early modern European maritime knowledge, making it especially useful for readers studying the history of geographical discovery, travel literature, and the history of textual compilation. Readers should note the perspectival limitations imposed by the original's period of composition, using it with a critical awareness of historical sources—as a historical document rather than a modern geographical guide.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the overall table of contents and this volume's contents first, identify voyages or regions of interest before delving in, and avoid plowing through from the beginning.
  2. Use maps or geographical reference works to locate routes while reading, aiding comprehension of place names and directions in the accounts.
  3. Compare accounts of the same region with other voyage literature, noting differences in narrative and the limitations of period perspectives.
  4. Treat this volume as a reference work, taking notes by theme and building your own source index.

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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  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
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  8. 8
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FAQ

Can I read Volume 5 directly without having read the first four volumes? Yes. Such collections are mostly arranged by voyage or region, and each volume is relatively independent; reading Volume 5 directly will not prevent understanding due to missing earlier content. However, if you want to grasp the compilation logic of the whole collection, browsing the overall contents will be helpful.
Are the geographical accounts in the book still accurate today? They should not be measured by today's geographical standards. They reflect the observations and understanding of Europeans at the time of composition, and some place names, directions, and descriptions carry period limitations; they should be used as historical documents rather than modern geographical references.
Is it suitable for reading through or for consultation? More suitable for consultation. The collection is large in scale and compilational in format; selecting specific voyages or regions by interest is more efficient. If you insist on reading through, it is advisable to proceed volume by volume and theme by theme while taking notes.

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.