A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 13

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

Rating 3.0
Word count
1.3M words
Chapters
128

Tags

English Originals Historical Geography CartographyDiscoveryExpedition RecordsTravelogueMaritime ExplorationSea JournalExotic CultureColonial EraCross-Cultural ViewCustoms and Lands

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 13 by Robert KerrAuthor: Kerr, Robert, 1755-1813,Language: English, Class: G: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation, Release Date: Dec 25, 2004

Editor's review

This is Volume 13 of Robert Kerr's compilation of voyages and travels, a product of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European tradition of organizing geographical knowledge. Its value lies not in literary quality but in showing how early modern Europeans systematically collected, arranged, and disseminated voyage records and geographical observations from around the world; it is useful for research on the history of geography, the history of travel writing, and the conventions of knowledge compilations. As a public-domain e-book, it is easy to search and cite, and is better used as a source of leads to historical material than read straight through. Readers should note the compiler's selective perspective and the limitations of his era, and understand the geographical descriptions and accounts of other cultures in historical context. It suits readers with a clear research purpose or a lasting interest in voyage literature; casual browsing also reveals how such compilations were organized.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and the opening notes first to understand the volume's scope before choosing sections for close reading.
  2. Read alongside maps or a geographical dictionary to reduce difficulties caused by place names and older forms of names.
  3. Use it through excerpts and indexing, drawing relevant passages by research topic rather than reading it straight through.
  4. When encountering accounts of other cultures, note the compiler's standpoint for later critical analysis.

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
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81
  82. 82
  83. 83
  84. 84
  85. 85
  86. 86
  87. 87
  88. 88
  89. 89
  90. 90
  91. 91
  92. 92
  93. 93
  94. 94
  95. 95
  96. 96
  97. 97
  98. 98
  99. 99
  100. 100
  101. 101
  102. 102
  103. 103
  104. 104
  105. 105
  106. 106
  107. 107
  108. 108
  109. 109
  110. 110
  111. 111
  112. 112
  113. 113
  114. 114
  115. 115
  116. 116
  117. 117
  118. 118
  119. 119
  120. 120
  121. 121
  122. 122
  123. 123
  124. 124
  125. 125
  126. 126
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  128. 128

FAQ

Is this book a complete history of voyages? No. It is Volume 13 of Kerr's compilation of voyages and travels, part of a multi-volume compilation. Its content depends on the compiler's collecting and arrangement and must be understood in light of the whole compilation's conventions; a single volume does not constitute a complete history.
What language background is needed to read this book? The original is in English, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prose conventions and old spellings and place-name forms. A good command of English is advisable, along with maps or geographical reference works for comparison; otherwise the reading effort increases markedly.
Why is it better suited as a source of historical material than as a book to read? Because its core value lies in preserving and arranging voyage records and geographical observations. Its organization is that of a compilation and lacks a unified narrative thread. Researchers can search and cite it by topic, but general readers seeking storytelling may lose the motivation to continue.

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.