ABSTRACT

IN telling the story of the Mary Galley I have found myself obliged to follow a different course from that hitherto employed in editing volumes for this Society. In this case it has not been so much a matter of elucidating a traveller’s tale as of compiling the history of a ship out of a mass of manuscript papers left behind by a mariner merchant of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Those belonging to one of the many ships with which he was concerned have had to be picked out from a great number of others relating to divers ships and affairs and then sorted into definite categories, out of which a continuous narrative could be made. In pursuing this course of editing the docu­ ments themselves, I have adopted the plan of writing a series of introductory remarks to each set of papers so as to tell the story, and of attaching thereto the appropriate copies of the manuscripts, annotated where necessary, as the best method of making the details of the tale clear to the reader’s mind and keeping him aufait with the contents of this part of Bowrey’s remains.