SAMUEL PURCHAS AND THE COSMOGRAPHICAL PILGRIMAGE

The English parson Samuel Purchas (1577–1626) is best known as the successor of Richard Hakluyt for the massive twenty books of his Pilgrimes (London, 1625), in which he collected the travel accounts of all times `not by one professing methodically to deliver the historie of nature according to rules of art, nor philosophically to discuss and dispute; but as in a way of discourse, by each traveller relating what in that kind he hath seene'. The distinction between methodical exposition according to general analytical headings, and the original narratives of the travellers using their own words `in a way of discourse', was one crucial to the culture of the late Renaissance, especially in England, and supported the new ideas of scientific method developed by contemporaries of Purchas like Francis Bacon. Purchas himself explained this when he defined his travel collection as a kind of natural history: `As David prepared materials for Solomon's temple; or (if that be too arrogant) as Alexander furnished Aristotle with huntsmen and observers of creatures to acquaint him with their diversified natures; or (if that also seeme too ambitious) as sense, by induction of particulars, yeeldeth the premisses to reasons syllogisticall arguing … so here Purchas and his pilgrimes minister individuall and sensible materials (as it were stones, bricks and mortar) to those universal speculators to their theoreticall structures'.