The World Encompassed

In this authoritative study, first published in 1981, Geoffrey Scammell traces the course of European expansion between around 800 and 1650, during which time the world known to western Europeans was enlarged in a way unparalleled before or since. The book takes a broad historical perspective, linking the classic age of European expansion to its medieval antecedents. The Norse reached North America in the tenth century, Italian missionaries and traders were established in China in the high Middle Ages, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in some of the greatest voyages ever made under sail, Iberian explorers crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and established footholds in the Americas, Africa and Asia. This is a stimulating and perceptive study, based on wide-ranging research, which makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the influence of empire on both colonial and metropolitan societies.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This account of Drake's circumnavigation of the world in 1577-1580 was first published by his nephew in 1628 and appears to derive from notes made by Francis Fletcher, the chaplain to the expedition, although a surviving manuscript account by Fletcher is not identical. The introduction to this edition (published in 1854) discusses textual problems, and also puts the narrative into the context of Drake's career as one of the privateers who carried on England's unacknowledged war with Spain in the decades before the Armada.

The work is edited with 'Appendices illustrative of the Same Voyage', and introduction, from the 1628 edition 'collected out of the notes of Master Francis Fletcher', collated with British Library, Sloane MS 61. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1854.