ABSTRACT
A history must have a theme if it is to be more than a chronicle, and the theme of this history would be the sudden efflorescence and maturing of travel literature in England as a conscious literary genre within the short space of fifty years. In Tudor England many important classical works of travel and geography were separately published in translation: Caesar's account of Britain, Polybius, the poem The surveye of the world Periegesis of Dionysius Afer, Herodotus, and Solinus, the Germania of Tacitus, and the notable Pliny. With the accelerated pace of travel in the age of the later European discoveries of India and America, all voyages in the public interest came to require a formal record. Altogether Richard Hakluyt collected some two hundred English travel narratives. If we now turn back to the chronological order of the writing, as distinct from the publishing, of the new travel literature, we begin with the Russia-Persia voyages.
