First Explorers

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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India.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 volume, first published in 1877, contains four contemporary accounts of the voyages of Sir James Lancaster (c. 1555–1618) between 1591 and 1600 together with the journal of Captain John Knight from his 1606 voyage to discover the 'North-West Passage'. Sir James Lancaster was one of the leading traders and explorers of the Elizabethan era, whose first voyage to India in 1591 was instrumental in establishing the East India Company in 1600.

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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India.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 1881 volume contains accounts by William Baffin (1584–1622) and others of Baffin's voyages exploring the coasts of Greenland and Spitsbergen, and his search for the North-West Passage. Although he did not find a route east, he got considerably further north than previous navigators, and provided much useful information on the conditions and natural resources of the area. His meticulous chart making and record keeping, and his use of lunar observations to calculate longitude, were groundbreaking and remarkably accurate, as later explorers found.

In 1880, the Royal Geographical Society commissioned Sir Clements R. Markham, a noted British geographer and the Society's secretary, to write a history of its formation, and of the many expeditions it had supported since 1830, to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Published in 1881, The Fifty Years' Work of the Royal Geographical Society consists of twelve chapters. The first five are a condensed history of the original group of geographers who called themselves the Raleigh Club, and the events leading up to the Society's official formation. Chapters 6 and 7 recount the activities of past presidents, secretaries and leading members of the Society, with the rest of the book detailing the fascinating scientific expeditions the Society sponsored financially from the Arctic to Antarctica, the explorers who took part in them, and the various publications the Society published to advance natural science and exploration.