Books > History > World history > 1500 to 1750
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Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,274
Discovery Miles 12 740
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Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana (Paperback)
Series: Hakluyt Society, Third Series
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Sir Walter Ralegh's account of his 1595 expedition to the Orinoco
in search of the fabled empire of El Dorado was an immediate
publishing success and is one of the most important pieces of
Elizabethan travel literature. This edition presents, on facing
pages, the annotated texts of a previously unpublished copy of
Ralegh's fair manuscript draft of The Discoverie of the Large,
Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana and the subsequent printed
versions, and demonstrates very clearly how Sir Robert Cecil and
Ralegh's few other serious backers induced the reluctant author to
alter his manuscript for publication. Lively tales of Amazon women,
drinking bouts and swash-buckling adventures, which would have
fascinated armchair travellers, were firmly deleted. The focus of
his appeal to investors was shifted from an ephemeral golden empire
to actual gold mines to which, as his manuscript shows, he had
originally paid little attention and for which he had very little
evidence. In effect Ralegh was forced to develop a strategy to
mediate between what he believed to exist and what he actually
found, between his dreams of what he might accomplish and the real
obstacles which faced him in the field, between his creative,
imaginative response to his recent journey and the need to present
it in such a way as to encourage others to undertake another such
journey with him. The materials collected in the appendices
indicate that while men like John Ley were immediately inspired to
explore Guiana, bringing back fabulous tales of monstrous peoples,
Ralegh lost interest until he saw a chance to free himself from
imprisonment in the Tower by inventing stories of Orinoco gold
mines which he had never mentioned in either the draft or the
published version of The Discoverie.
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