A rare complete set of the much enlarged Hague/Amsterdam edition – with all 762 maps and plates in 25 volumes – of “an important and scarce collection” (Hill) encompassing travel and ethnographic accounts from all corners of the world.
The collection is particularly strong on the East Indies (vols 1–2, 10–12, 14–16, 17) but also has extensive material on Africa (2–6); China, Tartary, and Tibet (7–10); Japan (14); Hindustan and Arabia (13–14); Australasia and Antarctica (16); and the Americas and Arctic (23–25). Among the voyages included are those of Albuquerque, Anson, Bering, Cabot, Las Casas, Columbus, Dampier, Drake, da Gama, Gmelin, De Houtman, Hudson, Kaempfer, Magellan, Le Maire, Maupertuis, Pinto, Marco Polo, Raleigh, Roggeveen, Schouten, Tasman, and Van Diemen. Also included are biographies of 28 governors-general of the Dutch East Indies. The many fine engravings – maps, aerial views, local scenes, as well as flora and fauna – are mostly the work of Jakob van der Schley, cartographer and student of the great Bernard Picart.
This splendid edition traces its origin to the four-volume New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1745–7), published anonymously and often known as the Astley Collection, after its publisher. This was the work of one Braddock Mead, alias John Green, an Irishman whose shadowy life included the kidnapping of an heiress (for which Mead’s accomplice was hanged), gambling, hack work, and an unusual talent for cartography. (Mead’s maps are noted for their accuracy and their particular attention to the transcription of foreign names.) A successor to Hakluyt, Purchas, and the Churchills, Mead’s New General Collection brought together and translated a vast range of travellers’ accounts enhanced by much bibliographical detail and critical commentary.
The collection was almost immediately republished in Paris in an elegant translation, with many revisions, by the Abbe´ Pre´vost, who had been planning a compilation of this sort since 1733. Better known today for his novels, the Abbe´ was no stranger to travels: twice expelled from the Jesuits, he fled each time to Holland before returning to France, fighting once as an officer in Catalonia; was driven by a lettre de cachet to London, which he in turn had to leave after seducing the daughter of Sir John Eyles, erstwhile director of the East India Company and subgovernor of the South Sea Company, to whose son he was tutor; fled in debt from Amsterdam back to London, where he was gaoled for forging a cheque; and finally returned to France under papal absolution to join the Benedictines. It was possibly this odyssey that led him to take the name d’Exiles. Nor was the Histoire générale his only translation from the English, standing alongside his gallicizations of Dryden, Richardson, and Hume.
His translation of the Histoire générale was ordered by d’Aguesseau, Chancellor of France, and likely sponsored by Maurepas, Secretary of the Navy and a keen advocate of the merchant marine and exploration. Published with maps improved and augmented by Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, hydrographer to the king of France and prolific contributor to the Encyclope´die, Pre´vost’s translation was both a “monumental enterprise” (Leborgne) and a bestseller: “every philosophe of the second half of the eighteenth century had it to hand” (Sgard). Drawn on by Rousseau, Voltaire, Buffon, Raynal, Diderot, and Sade, it became Pre´vost’s best-known work in his day.
The collection evolved again in the Hague/Amsterdam edition of 1747–80, of which the present item is a fine and complete example. The editor here was J. P. J. du Bois, charge´ d’affaires of Poland and Saxony in The Hague, who reprinted Pre´vost’s translation with many revisions and improvements. The translation was diligently compared with the English original, with all of Pre´vost’s omissions and additions marked in brackets. Additional accounts were included, some of them added by Mead himself under contract with the Dutch publishers. The maps were likewise reproduced and corrected, published alongside a further 131 engravings not found in the Paris edition.
This enlarged edition drew Pre´vost’s ire. He took to attacking it in prefaces to subsequent volumes, censuring the revisions made to his translation and (unfairly) alleging a reduction in the number of engravings. The Dutch editors duly reprinted his prefaces, to which they added postscripts answering his accusations, stressing in particular their greater fidelity to sources and the superiority of their maps.
Also translated into Danish, Dutch, German, and Spanish, this encyclopaedic collection is a crowning achievement of Enlightenment world knowledge and cartography, represented here in its most desirable edition.
Provenance: belonged to the Northern Lighthouse Board and carries the board’s gilt stamp on the spine of each volume. The board’s library, dispersed in 2010, was particularly strong in works of travel and exploration.
Individual volumes and partial sets are not uncommon in institutions but only three libraries in the UK hold the complete set (British Library, King’s College London, Strathclyde University).
STCN 250639408 et al.; Crone, ‘John Green’ and ‘Further notes on Bradock Mead’, Imago Mundi 6 (1950), 85–91 and 8 (1951), 69–70; Leborgne, Bibliographie des e´crivains français: Pre´vost d’Exiles; Sgard, Vie de Pre´vost; Boucher de la Rocharderie, i. 93ff.; Cordier, Japonica, viii. 405, Sinica, 1947; Cox, i. 32; Hill 1391; Landwehr, VOC, 266; Lust 254; Sabin 65402.
