A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16

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

Rating 3.5
Word count
1.2M words
Chapters
124

Tags

English Originals World History Family BondsStage LifeMemoirSelf-ReflectionSocial ObservationVictorian EraFemale Perspective

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 16 by Robert KerrAuthor: Kerr, Robert, 1755-1813,Language: English, Class: G: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation, Release Date: Aug 7, 2005

Editor's review

This book is one of the collections of voyages and travels compiled by Robert Kerr, a representative work of the kind that systematically organized travel materials in the early modern English-speaking world. By gathering voyages, geographical accounts, and travel narratives from various sources, the compiler turns scattered records into a body of material that can be consulted and compared. Its value lies not only in preserving early cross-regional observations but also in showing how travel narratives connect geographical knowledge, ethnographic description, exotic imagination, and personal experience. It suits readers of historical geography, enthusiasts of travel literature, and those studying the circulation of knowledge and travel writing in the early modern period. Because the sources are heterogeneous, readers should note differences in authors' standpoints, period biases, and the reliability of materials; when appreciating it as a historical text, they should also cross-check it against later research.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin by browsing the table of contents and the sources of the chapters, distinguishing voyage records and travel observations from the editor's organizational text.
  2. Select chapters on the same region or theme and read them side by side, comparing different narrators' observations.
  3. While reading, note place names, products, customs, and evaluations, and distinguish fact, hearsay, and cultural imagination.
  4. After finishing, consult relevant historical and geographical materials to correct period-specific judgments in the text.

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

FAQ

Is this book a single navigator's personal travelogue? It should not be simply regarded as a continuous travelogue by a single author. It is a compilation of voyages and travel documents whose sources and narrative perspectives may differ, and it is better understood as a collection of historical materials and travel writing.
Is Volume 16 suitable for ordinary readers to read straight through? For research purposes, one may first select relevant chapters according to the table of contents; to understand how the compilation is organized, one may sample texts from different sources. Reading every chapter straight through is time-consuming and requires continuous identification of various kinds of historical information.
How can one recognize the limitations of early travel literature while reading? Pay particular attention to the regional ordering, racial evaluations, and exotic imagination in the text. They reflect the knowledge boundaries and observational standpoints of a particular era and should not be taken directly as comprehensive, objective modern descriptions of the regions concerned.

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.