Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels:

Travel and Colonial Writing in English,

1550-1630: An Anthology, 2nd Edition
Andrew Hadfield
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Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels
 Amazons, Savages, and
Machiavels
Travel and Colonial Writing in English,
1550–1630: An Anthology

2nd Edition

Edited by
M ATT H E W D I M M O C K A N D A N D R E W
HADFIELD
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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 Acknowledgements

It has been a great pleasure revising this edition for the press who
initially solicited the project in 1998. Andrew Hadfield would like to
thank Matthew Dimmock for his scholarly expertise, good humour
and friendship, which now goes back nearly as far as the first edition
(2001). In particular, Prof. Dimmock has enabled the anthology to
become far more global in scope, covering the vast range of the
Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, and Africa more comprehensively
than the first edition. Matthew Dimmock would like to thank Andrew
Hadfield for the characteristically generous invitation to jointly work
with him on this new edition, a process which has, as always, been a
joy, an honour, and a privilege.
The transcription has been checked and corrected in a few
places; the introduction, headnotes and notes have all been revised;
and some material omitted from the first edition for reasons of space
and balance. The edition has been considerably expanded with the
addition of material from George Abbot, William Adams, John Davis,
Richard Jobson, Richard Madox, Thomas Platter, Edward Terry, Henry
Timberlake, Lady Catherine Whetenhall, and many others. We hope
it reaches all readers interested in early modern global culture,
English literature and the wider world, travel writing, English/British
perceptions of Europe, colonialism and colonial history, the first
British Empire, decolonizing the curriculum, the history of race and
racism, and other subjects.
We would also like to thank the many colleagues who have
helped us develop our ideas along the way: Daniel Carey and Claire
Jowitt of the Hakluyt Project; Farah Karim-Cooper and Will Tosh at
the Globe; and a number of experts in the field of travel and colonial
writing, including Dennis Britton, Edward Chaney, Kim Coles, Nandini
Das, Chloe Houston, Sir Noel Malcolm, Ladan Niayesh, Jyotsna
Singh, and Ayanna Thompson. Colleagues in libraries have been
helpful throughout and we would like to thank The Bodleian Library,
Oxford; The British Library; The Folger Shakespeare Library; and The
University of Sussex Library. As ever, it has been a pleasure to work
with everyone at Oxford University Press and we would like to thank
Eleanor Collins, Jacqueline Norton, Karen Raith, and Aimee Wright
for making the transition from idea to edition such an enjoyable
journey.
For permission to reproduce material we would like to thank the
Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society and Prof. Michael Brennan
for the extracts from Sir Charles Somerset’s Travel Diary; and The
British Library for the extracts from Richard Madox’s Diary, Thomas
Dallam’s Diary, and William Adams’s ‘Logbook’. For permission to
reproduce the images we would like to thank The British Library
(cover, Figures 1, 7, 12); The British Museum (Figures 5, 6, 17); The
Bodleian Library, Oxford (Figures 2, 3, 4, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20,
21, 22); Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Figures 8, 9, 11); The
National Trust (Figures 10a and 10b).
Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield
 Contents

List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Note on the Text

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1. MOTIVES FOR TRAVEL AND INSTRUCTIONS TO

TRAVELLERS

INTRODUCTION
Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570)
Francis Bacon, Letter from Thomas Bodley (c.1579) and ‘Of Travel’
(1612)
Thomas Coryat, Prefatory Material to Coryat’s Crudities (1611)
Richard Eden, The Decades of the New World, or West India (1555),
‘The Preface to the Reader’
Richard Hakluyt the younger, Prefatory Material to The Principal
Navigations (1589, 1598)
Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrims
(1625), ‘Epistle to the Reader’ and On Solomon’s Navy

2. EUROPE

INTRODUCTION
Sir Robert Dallington, The View of France (1604)
Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611), Observations of Venice,
Germany, and Switzerland
The Return of Master William Harborne from Constantinople over
land to London, 1588
Sir Charles Somerset, Travel Diary (1611–12), Observations of Paris
and Florence
Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617), Observations of Italy and
Ireland
William Lithgow, The Total Discourse of The Rare Adventures (1632),
Account of his Imprisonment in Spain

3. THE NORTH

INTRODUCTION
George Abbot, A Brief Description of the Whole World (1599)
Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617), Observations of Denmark:
Copenhagen and Elsinore
Giles Fletcher the elder, The history of Russia (1591), Description of
Russia
George Best, A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discovery
(1578), On the Discovery of Meta Incognita
Sir George Peckham, ‘A true report of the late discoveries…of the
Newfound Lands’ (1583)
John Davis, On the Inuit of Greenland (1586)

4. AFRICA

INTRODUCTION
Sebastian Munster, A treatise of the new India, trans. Richard Eden
(1553), The Islands of East Africa
‘The Voyage Made by M. John Hawkins…to the coast of Guinea, and
the Indies of Nova Hispania’ (1564)
Richard Madox, Diary (1582), Observations of Sierra Leone
Duarte Lopes, A Report of the Kingdom of the Congo (1597),
Description of the Congo and Southern Africa
Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, The History and Description of
Africa, trans. John Pory (1600), Comments on North Africans
George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey Begun…1610 (1615),
Observations of the Egyptians
Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade: or the Discovery of the River
Gambra (1623)

5. ISLAMIC WEST ASIA AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN

INTRODUCTION
Anthony Jenkinson, Kazan to the Caspian Sea and the Tatar Peoples
(1558)
Thomas Dallam, Diary (1599–1600), Journey through the Eastern
Mediterranean to Istanbul
Anthony Sherley, Sir Anthony Sherley: his Relation of his Travels into
Persia (1613), Persian Statecraft and Religion
Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617), Observations of the Ottoman
Empire
George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey Begun…1610 (1615),
Observations of the Jews of Ottoman Palestine
Henry Timberlake, A True and Strange Discourse on the Travailes of
Two English Pilgrims (1603), Description of Ottoman Jerusalem
William Lithgow, The Total Discourse of The Rare Adventures (1632),
Comments on Jerusalem

6. EAST ASIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS

INTRODUCTION
Francis Petty, ‘The admirable and prosperous voyage of…Thomas
Cavendish…into the South Sea, and from thence round about the
circumference of the whole earth’ (1586–8), Observations of the
South Sea Islanders
‘A Letter of Father Diego De Pantoia…written [from] the Court of the
King of China’ (9 March 1602)
Sir Henry Middleton, Two Accounts of his Voyage to the Moluccas
(1604–6)
Two Accounts of Japan: Arthur Hatch (1623) and John Saris (1613)
Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (1616–19), Account of the
Mughal Court
William Adams, Logbook (1614–19), Journey to Cochin China and
Tonkin
Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy in Asia (1628–34),
Observations of India

7. THE AMERICAS

INTRODUCTION
Richard Eden, The Decades of the New World, or West India (1555),
Three Descriptions of Indigenous Americans
Bartolomé de Las Casas, A briefe narration of the destruction of the
Indies by the Spaniards, trans. M. M. S. (1583)
Thomas Harriot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of
Virginia (1588, 1590)
Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful
Empire of Guiana (1596)
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, ‘Of the Cannibals’ (1580), trans. John
Florio (1603)
William Strachey, The History of Travel into Virginia Britania (1612)
Captain John Smith, The General History of Virginia, New-England,
and the Summer Isles (1624), The Story of Pocahontas

8. ENGLAND FROM ELSEWHERE

INTRODUCTION
Nicander Nucius, ‘Travels’ (1546), Relation of England, Scotland, and
Ireland
Étienne Perlin, ‘Description of England’ (1553?)
Thomas Platter, Diary (1599), Journey from Calais to London
Emmanuel van Meteren, ‘Description of the English’ (c.1612)

EPILOGUE: WOMEN TRAVELLERS

INTRODUCTION
‘The Voyage of Lady Catherine Whetenhall from Brussels into Italy’
(1649–50)

Guide to Further Reading

Index
 List of Figures

1. ‘The Departure of a Traveller’. © The British Library Board: BL MS Egerton

1222, f. 44.
2. Coryat and a Venetian Courtesan from Thomas Coryat, Coryats Crudities
(1611), 263. By kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
3. Venetian Gentleman at Piazza San Marco, Venice from G. Franco, Habiti
d’huomini et donne venetiane (1610–14) n.p. By kind permission of the
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
4. ‘The Author in the Rack at Malaga’ from William Lithgow, Totall Discourse
(1632), 455. By kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
5. ‘Arnaq’ by John White, 1577. © Trustees of the British Museum: SL
5270.11v.
6. ‘Skirmish at Bloody Point’ after John White c. 1577. © Trustees of the British
Museum: SL 5270.12.
7. Richard Madox’s sketch of an African woman ‘finely pinked’. © The British
Library Board, BL Cotton MS, Titus BVIII, f. 181v.
8. West African King from Duarte Lopes, A Report of the Kingdom of the Congo
(1597), 84. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi
College, Oxford.
9. ‘The Pyramids’ from George Sandys, Relation of a Journey (1615), 128. By
permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
10a. Van Dyck, Portrait of Robert Sherley, 1622. Petworth House. © National
Trust.
10b. Van Dyck, Portrait of Lady Teresia Sampsonia Sherley, 1622. Petworth
House. © National Trust.
11. The Church of Christ’s Sepulchre from George Sandys, Relation of a Journey
(1615), 165. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi
College, Oxford.
12. ‘Chart of the World showing the circumnavigation of Drake and Cavendish’
from Judocus Hondius, Vera Totius Expenditionis Nauticae (1595). © The
British Library Board.
13. ‘Map of China’ from Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His
Pilgrimes (1625), III, 400-1. By kind permission of the Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford.
14. ‘The Great Mogol’ from Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India (1655), 364. By
kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
15. Peter Mundy, ‘A Case of Satī at Surat in 1630’ from his Travels (1628-34), MS
Rawl. A. 315, f. 31r. By kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of
Oxford.
16. Peter Mundy, ‘Drawings of a Bajrā or Mayūr Pankhi, a native pleasure boat’
from his Travels (1628-34), MS Rawl. A. 315, between f.60v and f.61r. By
kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
17. ‘The aged Man’ by John White, c.1585–6. © Trustees of the British Museum:
SL 5270.10v.
18. ‘A weroan or great Lord of Virginia’ from Thomas Harriot, Briefe and True
Report of…Virginia (1590), plate III. By kind permission of the Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford.
19. ‘Their manner of carrying their Children and attire of the chief Ladies of the
town of Dasamonquepeuc’ from Thomas Harriot, Briefe and True Report of…
Virginia (1590), plate X. By kind permission of the Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford.
20. ‘Their sitting at meat’ from Thomas Harriot, Briefe and True Report of…
Virginia (1590), plate XVI. By kind permission of the Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford.
21. ‘The Town of Secota’ from Thomas Harriot, Briefe and True Report of…
Virginia (1590), plate XX. By kind permission of the Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford.
22. ‘Map of Virginia’ from John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (1624),
between 40 and 41. By kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of
Oxford.
 List of Abbreviations

AB The Art Bulletin

AC Archaeologica Cantiana
AHR The American Historical Review
AOASH Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae
CEA Cahiers d’Etudes Africanes
DR Downside Review
ELR English Literary Renaissance
FAR Frontiers of Architectural Research
G&R Greece and Rome
JAH The Journal of African History
JEMH The Journal of Early Modern History
JM Journal of Mammology
JMH The Journal of Modern History
JWH The Journal of World History
LC Literature Compass
L&L Lives and Letters
MP Modern Philology
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED Oxford English Dictionary
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Society of America
PN1 Richard Hakluyt, The principall navigations (London: George Bishop
and Ralph Newberie, 1589)
PN2 Richard Hakluyt, The principal navigations, 3 vols. (London: George
Bishop, Ralph Newberie and Robert Barker, 1598–1600)
PNM Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 12 vols. (Glasgow:
MacLehose, 1903)
PP Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his pilgrimes 4 vols
(London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625)
PPM Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20
vols. (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905–7)
RD Renaissance Drama
RS Renaissance Studies
SCJ Sixteenth-Century Journal
SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900
SP Studies in Philology
SPCK The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge
SQ Shakespeare Quarterly
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly
 Note on the Text

Our primary concern in preparing text for this edition has been
accessibility. Where the first edition adopted a light touch in terms of
modernization, we have sought to make the text more
comprehensible to the non-specialist reader without losing sight of
the meaning of the original and, where possible, retaining its
idiosyncrasies. Although printing increasingly standardized form and
typographical conventions, there was throughout the period 1550–
1630 a great deal of variation and little standardization in spelling in
printed books. This can generate confusion, but it can also open up
a rich field of meaning in which, for example, the distinction
between travel and travail (work) could be usefully blurred.
Modernizing a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century text is therefore
more than simply making it uniform, and the obvious gains need to
be balanced against the less conspicuous losses. In practice this has
meant removing the long s and ligatures, and regularizing the use of
i/j and u/v; silently modernizing spelling (including the addition of
apostrophes); standardizing other formatting elements where
meaning is not affected; and changing punctuation where it is an
impediment to clarity. However we have retained the original spelling
of proper nouns—in particular names of people and places—and in
cases of quotation and/or transliteration in order to retain the
immediacy of the original text and preserve the confusions,
misunderstandings, and misrepresentations that travel invariably
generated. The result of these changes can be seen, for example, in
Richard Eden’s distinctive 1553 translation of Munster, A treatise of
the new India, where he describes the inhabitants of Zanzibar as ‘of
grosse and ſhorte ſtature: but yf theyr heygth dydde aunswere to
theyr thickenesse and breadth, they mighte seme to be giauntes’.
Modernized for this edition, this same sentence reads, ‘of gross and
short stature: but if their height did answer to their thickness and
breadth, they might seem to be giants’.1
Editorial work of this kind might seem a fairly straightforward
process, and for print it often is. When working with manuscript
sources, however, the issues are magnified and an editor’s influence
on the text is consequently greater. We have incorporated a number
of manuscript sources in this new edition, which are particularly
useful for giving a sense of the form and content of travellers’ diaries
and the logbooks of ships’ captains. One example of the latter is the
logbook kept by William Adams concerning an ultimately
unsuccessful journey to Thailand. His entry for the 26 January
records discontent amongst his crew, and originally reads: ‘bvt at
novnne our menn would not Covme to woovrk bvt wovld have theer
hire which was dev to them in Siame so I had mvch ado with theme
this day wass thurssdaye the wind at no no wst fovlle wether with
raynne’. Editing here involves the addition of punctuation and the
expansion of contractions alongside modernizing Adams’s spelling. In
this edition the same text reads thus: ‘but at noon our men would
not come to work but would have their hire which was due to them
in Siame so I had much ado with them, this day was Thursday the
wind at north-northwest, foul weather with rain’.2
Throughout the anthology we have attempted to preserve
sections of text wherever possible, but where passages of the text
are omitted, the symbols […] are used. We have retained marginal
notes from source texts only where they contribute to meaning
(rather than signalling content), and in such cases they are recorded
in the notes. Any changes we have made to the primary text, for
instance where errors have been identified that may have originated
in the printing process, are also indicated in the notes, whereas
occasional additions are placed in square brackets. Notes are
otherwise provided in order to elucidate meanings which are no
longer current or to situate the reader in terms of geography,
culture, or literary context.
 1 Sebastian Munster, A treatise of the new India, trans. Richard Eden (London:
Edward Sutton, 1553), E7r–E8v, and below, p. 146.
2 See C. J. Purnell, ed., The Log-Book of William Adams, 1614–19 (London:
The Eastern Press, 1916), 196, and below, p. 281.
 General Introduction

Travel and travel writing were vital to the intellectual ferment of the
English Renaissance, shaping and reshaping the world for a country
only belatedly emerging from the global periphery. This sense of
possibilities is present even in fairly typical, largely forgotten
accounts, such as that written by the Jacobean luminary Stephen
Powle. Long before he became a dependable chancery administrator
for James I, Powle had spent a decade of his life in travel: in his own
words, he took on ‘the person of a travailer’ [see Fig. 1].1
Continually in motion, he represented the state in Scotland, the
German states, and in Venice. As was often the case, his expertise
was itself born of travel, for his career had begun in his twenties
with a trip financed by his father that took him to Geneva, Basel,
Strasbourg, Speyer, Heidelberg, and Paris.2 It was from Paris that
Powle wrote home to reassure his family of his good health and the
value of their investment. He did not lack confidence: just as a
farmer was filled with joy when his hard work manuring the land
brought forth crops, so should Powle’s father be delighted at his
son’s letter, an ostentatious demonstration of, ‘if not the fruits’, then
at least ‘the blossoms’ that had bloomed from his ‘grateful soil’
thanks to travel.
Fig. 1 ‘The Departure of a Traveller’. © The British Library Board:
BL MS Egerton 1222, f. 44.

Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English men and

women travelled, and for many different reasons: for education and
aspiration, like Powle; for trade and/or diplomacy; compelled by war,
belief, or economic circumstance; sometimes out of simple curiosity.
For Powle the value of travel could be maximized by remembering
three simple maxims: the traveller should ‘heed fully to observe and
mark such things as he seeth’; curiously ‘enquire after such things
he knoweth not’; and—perhaps counter-intuitively—he should
studiously ‘peruse the works of such learned men as have imparted
their knowledge to others by describing the estates of all
commonwealths as well modern as ancient’. The importance of
observing and recording, of seeking out new knowledge, and of
established precedent: to different degrees these ideas underpin all
the travel writing from the period covered by this anthology, and
feature prominently in all the accounts we have included.
At its core, travel was a crucible in which knowledge could be
acquired and tested, and learning itself could be accelerated. Powle
marvelled at the sheer amount of experience he had gained in such
‘short space’, simply in ‘beholding the variety of laws, diversities of
governments, and great alteration of natures of people’ as he moved
from place to place. Extolling the inherently generative nature of
exposure to the world’s diversity was something of a commonplace,
but it was still controversial. Not everyone agreed on who should be
allowed to travel. Alongside fools and madmen, for instance, Thomas
Palmer, in his influential An essay of the meanes how to make our
travailes more profitable (1606), expressly forbade women to travel,
arguing that they would be better to remain at home. Palmer’s
strictures—which of course did not stop women travelling—were
probably based on the assumption that women should not venture
into the public realm unless special circumstances arose, and a fear
that women, being the weaker sex, would be more likely to lose
their identities and choose to remain in the countries they had
visited (a constant fear of Palmer’s treatise).3
Managing and explaining the variety of peoples and polities that
so enthralled Powle was similarly contentious; for some English
moralists the traveller’s exposure to such variety could be profoundly
dangerous (although see Coryat’s celebration of variety and travel
below, pp. 25–6). Many early modern travel and colonial writings are
saturated with the fear of what is now called transculturation—a
merging of cultures—but which was often characterized as
regression or miscegenation. There was also always the possibility
that the traveller would refuse to return: indeed, Powle’s letter to his
father is in part designed to allay exactly these concerns. Roger
Ascham’s famously vociferous attack on Italianate Englishmen was
rooted in the same anxieties, and there was ample precedent for the
religious and cultural transformation he described.4 A related fear
much nearer to home was the problem of ‘degeneration’, discussed
in virtually all late sixteenth-century English treatises on Ireland; the
belief that the English who settled in Ireland would go native and
become Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis, more Irish than the Irish
themselves.5 A similar anxiety shadows much contact with the
Ottoman Empire: the fear that Christians will abandon their religion
and ‘turn Turk’. Aside from a painful awareness that Islam claimed a
final revelation which superseded Christianity, much of the hostility
shown to the ‘Turks’ and other peoples of the multiethnic Ottoman
Empire perhaps stemmed from a recognition that cultural traffic was
generally from Christianity to Islam rather than simply a desire to
denigrate the enemy (see pp. 213–9).6
It was also the case that many English colonists in the Americas
merged into indigeous society, either through choice or the necessity
of moving from an agriculturally incompetent society to one in which
people had a chance of survival (see pp. 310–11).7 The European
‘discovery’ of the Americas inaugurated a whole series of debates in
Europe, principally in Spain, but continued in England, concerning
the nature and status of indigenous peoples. Were they, as some
argued, the ‘natural slaves’ of whom Aristotle had written; primitive
and lacking proper religion and civilization because they were an
inferior people who could be exploited as the Christian colonists
required and desired? Or were they actually representatives of pure,
innocent humanity that had become tainted by the Fall elsewhere in
the world, and so had much to teach the old, corrupt world of
Europe?8 The question of ‘natural man’, and whether a ‘state of
nature’ was superior or inferior to European civilization, is central to
Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Cannibals’ (see pp. 325–34). It also
underlies Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found
Land of Virginia, which included as an appendix a series of
illustrations of the Picts and Britons (as well as Adam and Eve),
inviting the reader to consider the relationship between the ancient
inhabitants of Britain and the peoples of the ‘New World’.9
As these examples suggest, an English traveller’s experience of
the variety of peoples in the world invariably meant negotiating
differences in religion, and often also in race. Powle’s itinerary is that
of a committed English Protestant, moving between celebrated
centres of European Protestant learning—Geneva and Basel—before
travelling to Paris, a key site for English travellers on the continent
as one of only two resident overseas embassies remaining by the
end of the sixteenth century (the other was in Istanbul).10 The
ongoing Reformation in England meant that the majority of Christian
Europe subscribed to an alien faith, and presented an opportunity
for a Protestant traveller to articulate and assay their own religious
tenets: after all, as John Milton would argue, drawing on a common
trope, only he ‘that can apprehend and consider vice with all her
baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish,
and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring
Christian’.11 Nowhere was this contest more pronounced than
Jerusalem, a city holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as
demonstrated in the accounts of Henry Timberlake and William
Lithgow (see pp. 225–37).
Ideas about race were unstable in this period and again travel
and travel writing presented an opportunity for writers and their
readers to work through and test their ideas; in this case
conceptions of the origins and meaning of racial difference and the
interrelation of race and religion. This meant becoming aware of
one’s own race as much as observing others’: as Syed Manzurul
Islam has recognized, the process of travelling often leads to ‘the
performative enactment of “becoming other” ’.12 Early modern travel
writing has played a prominent role in rethinking these dynamics in
recent years, in what has become a particularly vital area of
scholarship. Although there have always been specialists working in
these fields, material that was once the preserve of relatively small
numbers of academics has now reached a much wider audience.13
Once dominant, the work of Edward Said (his Orientalism (1978)
and Culture and Imperialism (1993) in particular) has been
increasingly criticized for its rather static conception of cultural
interaction, with a hegemonic, active West imposing itself upon a
subordinate, passive East.14 Other critics have developed and refined
Said’s historical analysis, particularly as it relates to the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, before the global establishment of
the British Empire. Moreover, as James G. Carrier has argued,
cultures of the East have been just as adept at constructing images
of the West.15 There can never be a simple case of one-way traffic.
Cultures interact, interrelate, and change, however powerful one
might be.16
The extent of the racism of English travellers and their culture in
this period has been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate. The
most recent and extensive study of the medieval and early modern
periods concludes that prejudice was indeed widespread and that
there was a belief that light-skinned peoples constituted a norm
inscribed by God.17 When read alongside the growing literature of
critical race studies the evidence for the anti-black and brown
prejudices of Europeans is certainly very strong.18 However, there is
a danger of homogenizing and distorting the historical record. Firstly,
as the account of Nicander Nucius demonstrates, whiteness was
itself not homogeneous, and the English were often identified as
excessively pale products of the northern periphery (see p. 351). It
can also be argued that the fundamental transformation of global
culture and conceptions of race took place after the early modern
period, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the
rapid expansion of the Atlantic slave trade, one of the crucial
economic factors in the advent of ‘modernity’, as Eric Woolf has
pointed out.19
Serfdom remained widespread in Europe before this juncture, as
was racial prejudice based on skin colour.20 But it was only after the
horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, when some 10–12 million Africans
were forcibly transported to the Americas that slavery became
inextricably bound up with blackness in the general imagination.21
When Hamlet, despairing of his ability to avenge his father, refers to
himself as a ‘rogue and peasant slave’, Shakespeare would appear to
be thinking of the peasant ‘slaves’ that were common throughout
Eastern and Northern Europe from the early Middle Ages onwards,
and were observed (and considered viable chattel) by Anthony
Jenkinson in his travels along the Volga (see pp. 192–8).22 When
Mary Collier (c.1688–1762) claims that her hard labour as a
washerwoman in Sussex made her ‘ever’ and ‘still a Slave’, and later
in the same poem that women ‘Could never be for Slavery design’d’,
it is clear that she has in mind slaves of African origin in the
American colonies and that slavery by this point is equated with
blackness.23
Projecting binary divisions between masters and slaves and black
and white backwards, as if such distinctions had always existed,
risks flattening out a complicated story of prejudice and diminishing
the impact of that holocaust. Medieval and early modern European
perceptions and prejudices of race were diverse and based as much
on notions of blood and inheritance and religious difference as on
skin colour. They were also malleable, and shifted according to
political circumstance. For Colin Kidd, well into the eighteenth
century European conceptions of ‘racial discourse remained
transitional, a hodgepodge of biological, climatic and stadialist [the
theory that a society passes through a series of stages]
interpretations of racial and cultural difference’.24 Anti-Semitism, as
Geraldine Heng argues, and the fear of an enemy within who was
hard to identify, were arguably greater preoccupations for Europeans
than denigrating a static, recognizable ‘other’, unless such people
posed an immediate threat.25
The variety of peoples in the world did not, as all these comments
suggest, necessarily imply fear or require the assertion of (white)
supremacy. Admiration and potent fantasies of the wealth of distant
civilizations are abundantly clear in the case of Marco Polo, whose
tales of the court of the Great Khan had such a decisive influence on
medieval and Renaissance travellers and helped establish a desirable
goal in the minds of explorers, traders, and adventurers journeying
both East and West (see p. 238). A similar conception of the Great
Khan also appeared in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the other
late medieval travel book which was to have significant impact on
Renaissance conceptions of the world.26 Both are examples of the
‘learned men’ who had ‘imparted their knowledge […] of all
commonwealths as well modern as ancient’ that Stephen Powle
asserted it was crucially important for travellers to read as part of
their travels. As a result, such legacies shaped the present. So as
English travellers celebrated the Ottomans or the Ming as the
harbingers of modernity, their descriptions invariably owed some
debt to Polo and Mandeville for, even when purportedly relating first-
hand impressions, they tended to draw upon a fabulous and
fantastical heritage that was deeply familiar to their readers.27
Admiration of these cultures also afforded travellers an
opportunity to reflect on unfamiliar political structures, comparing
them more or less explicitly with those at home. However,
admiration rarely extended to religion. Regardless of their
technological advancement—and accounts of China in particular are
filled with wonder in this regard—these peoples were still pagans
and thus associated with barbarism. This did not mean that they
were characterized as savage and uncivilized like the Irish, many
indigenous Americans, or the South Sea Islanders, but their
resistance to the Christian faith led to accounts foregrounding
cruelty, tyranny, and resistance to change, a pointed and instructive
contrast to enlightened, dynamic Christians who were in the midst of
rapid geographical and intellectual expansion. Such representations
are partly based, of course, on a fear of powerful rivals, especially
given the trade disputes over the Spice Islands (see pp. 253–61),
and the conflict between Christian Habsburg and Muslim Ottoman
Empires which dominated the period (see pp. 225–37), but those
who interacted closely with the Ottomans, Japanese, and Chinese
invariably had a more complicated understanding of other peoples.28
Another influential idea that emerged from the study of travel
writing helps explain the processes at work in these complex and
layered interactions. Mary Louise Pratt introduced the term ‘contact
zone’ in her analysis of Victorian expansion into Africa and South
America. The ‘contact zone’ refers to ‘the space of colonial
encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and
historically separated come into contact with each other and
establish ongoing relations’; a space of transculturation, of a
‘grappling’ between cultures often against a backdrop of coercion,
racial inequality, and conflict.29 Pratt’s coinage is useful and
vindicates the arguments of pioneering scholars such as Karen
Kupperman, who argued that English settlers in early colonial
Virginia had a much more positive conception of the indigenous
Americans through an understanding of their lives and culture than
those who wrote about the Americas from the distance and safety of
England.30 Pratt also suggested that women travellers tended to be
less hostile towards those they encountered in the ‘contact zone’ and
keen to question the ethics of conquest.31 Similarly, Sanjay
Subrahmanyam’s focus on the micro-historical in order to fully
explore what he calls ‘connected histories’ demonstrates that when
cultures met in this period there could never simply be
incomprehension or incommensurability: instead the early modern
world was bound together by material and conceptual exchanges
and histories.32
Vital issues such as these offer a direct line between the present
and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the ways in which
‘difference’ was understood then have a direct bearing on how we
understand it now. Numerous connections can be made between
contemporary debates and forms of writing and those produced four
hundred years ago, but we also need to acknowledge stubborn and
significant distinctions in some of their forms, functions, and
purposes. To take one relatively trivial example: many people still
have a conception of the ‘Grand Tour’, an experience that serves to
complete an education.33 Now, however, that tour is no longer
confined to Europeans, the aristocracy, or to European boundaries.
Millions travel abroad as part of their education, whether to see
important cultural monuments, learn languages, or simply to
experience the diversity of the world. Even so, as will be clear to the
reader, it would surely be stretching a point rather too much to see
the enterprise as straightforwardly comparable to Francis Bacon’s
belief in the value of travel, or Thomas Coryat’s explanation of the
reasons for his expedition to Europe (see pp. 22–3, 24–8).
 More significant are the specific historical situations which need to
be taken into account when reading many of the narratives
reproduced here. Sir Robert Dallington’s description of late sixteenth-
century France can be read as advice to his countrymen and women
about how to avoid the brutal sectarian conflict ravaging that
country and to ensure that the resulting hostilities and atrocities
could neither spread to nor be reproduced in England (see pp. 49–
55). Sir Charles Somerset, William Lithgow, and Fynes Moryson show
that European society was invariably read in terms of such religious
conflict (see pp. 68–102). Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of Guiana, his
emphasis on the sexual restraint of his men, and his description of
mythical Amazonian warrior women needs to be read in terms of his
relationship with Queen Elizabeth and anxiety about his own status
(see p. 320). Thomas Harriot’s account of Virginia requires careful
decoding. On the one hand, the Report is a scientific, ethnographic
account of a newly discovered people; on the other, it is a desperate,
propagandist enterprise, designed to counter the negative reports of
disgruntled colonists who had returned to Britain (see p. 309).
As often as not, the observers tell us as much about themselves
as they do about those they observe. The most striking example is
probably Captain John Smith’s account of his rescue by Pocahontas,
which has become a foundational American myth (see pp. 340–4).
Smith seems to have realized that he did not understand the
Powhatan society he encountered, and consciously attempted to
make sense of it in his own terms. The story can be read as a
hopeful exchange between sympathetic humans able to make the
effort to cross boundaries; or, as has been more common recently,
the tragic encounter of alien cultures. There is transculturation, but
perhaps only in a severely restricted sense.
This book makes no claims to be a comprehensive survey of
Anglophone travel writing in the English Renaissance. There is, as
there always is, far too much material to cover. Overall, our aim has
been to present the reader with the representations of various areas,
peoples, and countries which were available and important to
contemporary readers. We have not attempted to incorporate any
material on the ways and means of travel in the Renaissance, except
in so far as it is included in the first chapter on reasons for travel.
Readers interested in such questions should turn to the works of
John Stoye, Edward Chaney, John Parker, and Karen Kupperman
cited in the ‘Guide to Further Reading’ for more information on such
subjects (or, for an earlier period, Norbert Ohler, and Anthony Bale
and Sebastian Sobecki). Most of the material collected in the
anthology is in print and hence widely available, although a number
of manuscript accounts have been included in this second edition to
add to the account by Peter Mundy that appeared in the first. We
have also included a number of translations—Richard Eden’s
influential version of Peter Martyr d’Anghera, material from Richard
Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas—and not concentrated simply on
English travellers abroad, but on what could be accessed in England
and in English, along with some accounts of England by travellers
from elsewhere.
Structurally this edition differs quite considerably from the first.
Although we have not exactly followed the trajectory of early
modern English guides to the world such as George Abbot’s
perennially popular A briefe description of the whole world (1599),
we have attempted to replicate the areas of particular focus and the
ways in which writers and readers subdivided the world. An initial
chapter on the motivations for travel and instructions given to
travellers is followed by sections on travel to Europe, by some
margin the most important and regular destination for English
voyagers; the North (ranging widely from Canada to Russia), an
often overlooked but increasingly significant area of English
ambitions; the many different contexts of Africa; Islamic West Asia
and the Eastern Mediterranean, an area dominated by the Ottoman
Empire and Islam; the lesser known but fervently desired region of
East Asia and the South Seas; and the Americas. A shorter Chapter 8
incorporates a number of accounts of England by travellers from the
Mediterranean, Central Europe, and France, offering a counterpoint
to the English perspective that otherwise necessarily dominates.
Finally, an Epilogue enables us to extend our chronological remit to
include some consideration of women travellers in this period, and
the dearth of texts written by and/or about women travellers, whilst
incorporating the remarkable Roman Catholic tour across Europe
taken by Lady Catherine Whetenall in 1649–50.
Of course, there are a large number of works that we have not
been able to include for reasons of space. We regret that we have
not been able to include extracts from Pierre D’Avity’s large
encyclopaedia, The Estates, Empires and Principalities of the World,
translated by Edward Grimestone (1615). The work was clearly
important, is unjustly neglected—Grimestone was a busy and
important translator—and shows that a comprehensive collection of
geographical knowledge was within easy reach of many readers.34
We would also have liked to include passages from Richard Knolles’s
Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), which would have served as a
suitable companion piece to al-Wazzan’s Historie of Africa.35 It has
also been a shame not to have been able to have a section from
William Thomas’s influential Historie of Italie (1549), the first history
of Italy in English by an important figure who lived in the country.36
However, this expanded second edition has provided us with the
opportunity to add much new material and to provide more
comprehensive coverage.
The anthology begins in the 1550s, with the marriage of Mary I
(1516–58, ruled 1553–8) and the Habsburg prince Philip (1527–98,
ruled Spain 1556–98, ruled England 1554–8). England in 1550 was
an isolated, second-rate power on the fringes of Europe, having lost
ground in France and maintaining no more than a precarious
foothold in Ireland. Spain was the dominant force in Europe so when
the two nations were briefly united (1556–8), it was hardly on an
equal footing. The relationship with Spain developed into a rivalry
later, which was to define English relations with the wider world until
well into the seventeenth century. The anthology concludes c.1630,
soon after the death of James I (1625) and the publication of
Samuel Purchas’s expanded collection, Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625),
the most frequently consulted source of information on travel and
other cultures in the seventeenth century.37 By 1630 England was
becoming a major imperial power and had eclipsed Spain, which
declined dramatically in the first quarter of the seventeenth
century.38 In contrast, James VI and I had virtually united Britain
and Ireland under English suzerainty, paving the way for the first
British Empire.39 Rebellion in Ireland had been suppressed; an
empire in America was developing; trade with Asia and the Far East
had become increasingly important. If English readers relied mainly
on a few translations of travel writing in the 1550s for their
perceptions of other cultures, huge collections provided mainly first-
hand travel accounts for a much wider readership by 1630.

Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–
1630: An Anthology. Second Edition. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield,
Oxford University Press. © Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield 2022. DOI:
10.1093/oso/9780198871552.003.0001

1 ‘Stephen Powle’s account of his travels, written to his father’, BL Lansdowne

MS 100, f. 150r. All subsequent quotations come from this opening folio.
2 Powle’s life and career is detailed in his ODNB entry: see also Virginia F.
Stern, Sir Stephen Powle of Court and Country (London and Toronto: Associated
University Presses, 1992).
3 Thomas Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes How to Make Our Travailes into
Forraine Countries the More Profitable and Honourable (London: Humphrey
Lownes, 1607), 17. For more information, see the Epilogue, pp. 273–4.
4 Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature
and Drama, 1500–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 72–3.
5 Andrew Hadfield, ‘English Colonialism and National Identity in Early Modern
Ireland’, Eire/Ireland 28.1 (Spring, 1993), 69–86.
6 See Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater in the Multicultural
Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
7 Karen Ordhal Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English
and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield,
1980).
8 See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the
Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
for full details of the debates in Spain.
 9 Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English
Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 112–26.
10 A contraction discussed in Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 195.
11 John Milton, Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of
Vnlicens’d Printing (London: [s.n.], 1644), 12.
12 Syed Manzurul Islam, The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
13 See, for example, David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History
(London: Pan, 2016); Olivette Otele, African Europeans: An Untold History
(London: Hurst, 2020).
14 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978); Culture and
Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). The application of Said’s thesis has
been most notably refuted by Nabil Matar in his Islam in Britain, 1558–1685
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Turks, Moors, and Englishmen
in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), but see also
the introduction to Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to
the Ottoman Empire 1580–1720 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
15 James G. Carrier (ed.), Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995).
16 This is arguably the central point made by Homi K. Bhabha in his landmark
study, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bhabha has in turn
been criticized for underplaying the gap between the powerful and the powerless:
see Abdul R. JanMohamed, ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of
Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr (ed.), ‘Race’,
Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 78–106. See
also Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, Contexts, Practices, Politics (London:
Verso, 1997), ch. 4; Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the
West (London: Routledge, 1990), ch. 8.
17 Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
18 A useful introduction can be found in ‘Rereading Early Modern Race’ a
special issue of SQ ed. Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall, 67 (2016).
19 Eric R. Woolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982), pt. 2.
20 A subject discussed at length in Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe:
Conquest, Colonization and Culture, 950–1350 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).
21 Of the many studies, see, for example, Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the
Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1965); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).
 22 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.527 (The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen
Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008), 1731); Jerome Blum, ‘The Rise of
Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, AHR 62.4 (1957), 807–36.
23 Mary Collier, Poems, on Several Occasions (London, 1762), 5, 6. For
comment see Andrew Hadfield, Literature and Class from the Peasants’ Revolt to
the French Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 228.
24 Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in
the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
24. More generally, see Margaret T. Hogden, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971).
25 Geraldine Heng, ‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I & 2:
Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages’, LC 8.5 (2011), 315–31, 332–50.
26 The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, ed. C. W. R. D. Moseley
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), chs. 23–5.
27 See Matthew Dimmock, Elizabethan Globalism: England, China and the
Rainbow Portrait (London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2019),
10–25.
28 See, for example, Jonathan E. Lux, The Invention of China in Early Modern
England: Spelling the Dragon (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Dimmock,
Elizabethan Globalism.
29 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London: Routledge, 1992), 6.
30 Kupperman, Settling with the Indians.
31 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, ch. 5. See also Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An
Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991);
Saundra Hybels, ‘Travelling the World: Does Gender Make a Difference?’, in
Santiago Henríquez (ed.), Travel Essentials: Collected Essays on Travel Writing (Las
Palmas de Gran Canaria: Chandlon Inn Press, 1998), 99–109.
32 See the introduction to Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters:
Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2012).
33 That such tours were not as educational as many claimed or pretended is
argued in Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climes: Travel and Sex Since the Grand Tour
(London: John Murray, 2001).
34 For some comment on d’Avity and Grimestone, see Hadfield, Literature,
Travel and Colonial Writing, 105–11.
35 Both works were important sources for Othello. See Virginia Mason Vaughan,
Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3.
 36 On Thomas and Italy see Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation
England, 1530–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 105–10.
37 See James P. Helfers, ‘The Explorer or the Pilgrim? Modern Critical Opinion
and the Editorial Methods of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas’, SP 94 (1997),
160–86.
38 J. P. Cooper (ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History: Volume 4, The
Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War, 1609–48/49 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970).
39 Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to
the Close of the Seventeenth Century (The Oxford History of the British Empire,
Volume 1) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
 1
Motives for Travel and Instructions
to Travellers

Why did people decide to travel and how were they encouraged to
evaluate what they saw and experienced? Many aristocrats travelled
as part of their education; to observe other cultures; to make
contact with influential people at major European courts; and to gain
confidence in the ways of the world they were to inhabit in their
adult life. While it is true that the ‘Grand Tour’, as it became known,
assumed a greater importance and more central role in upper-class
English life in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
numerous influential courtiers and statesmen of the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries went on long European tours as young men.1
Many heeded the advice given in the following accounts, and
recorded their experiences. Women also travelled, but in fewer
numbers, less visibly, and left almost no written accounts.2 The usual
route for English travellers was to travel through France and Italy
towards Rome or Naples, stopping off in Venice and Florence, often
returning through Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries.3
From quite early on in Elizabeth’s reign, guides were available
which aimed to offset any ‘perceived perils of travel’ and ‘turn it as
far as possible into a controlled exercise, setting out itineraries and
stipulating the conduct and agenda of the cultural tourist’, the genre
commonly known as the Ars Apodemica, the art of travel.4 Even as it
became an art, it still required labour. The titles of the three most
influential handbooks all exploit the useful late sixteenth-century
slippage between travel and travail (meaning work): they were
Jerome Turler’s The Traveiler (1575); William Bourne’s A Treasure for
Traveilers (1578), and Justus Lipsius’s A Direction for Travailers
(1592). These were supplemented by translations in later works
such as Fynes Moryson’s An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres
Travell (1617): volume three opens with a long ‘Discourse of
Travelling in generall’, containing a series of precepts for travellers, a
collection of opinions of old writers, and advice on the most suitable
means to travel.5 Works such as Thomas Palmer’s An essay of the
meanes how to make our travailes more profitable (1606), contain
elaborate charts to help the traveller plan out a route, learn how to
observe the correct details, and take useful notes of his experiences.
Perhaps the most succinct expression of such advice can be found in
either Thomas Bodley’s standard letter of advice to a young Francis
Bacon, or Bacon’s later essay ‘Of Travel’, both of which we have
included here. As Michael Brennan observes (see p. 69), travellers to
Europe such as Sir Charles Somerset appear to have planned their
diaries in terms of the advice offered by writers like Bacon.
Not everyone was convinced of the benefits of travel. Many
suspected that the motives of travellers were rather less pure than
simply a search for educational enlightenment. All travellers
regardless of class had to obtain a licence from the monarch or Privy
Council (in itself an indication of the desire to regulate travel). The
document would note the period of absence granted, amount of
money taken, size of entourage (tutors, servants, and travelling
companions), and places forbidden to the traveller (most often,
Spain).6 As Felix Raab has pointed out, Henry VIII’s close links with
Italian courts and policy of encouraging courtiers to travel to Italy in
order to increase the sophistication of his own court led to a number
of bitter theological and political disputes, as well as some
spectacular defections, especially after the Reformation cut England
off from much of Europe.7 The first serious analysis of Italy, William
Thomas’s Historie of Italie (1549), was produced with the purpose of
using Italy to influence and transform English politics, a project
which was encouraged by Edward VI, but met with rather less
approval from his successors.8
Of course, the question of comparative government was a thorny
issue. If some, like William Thomas, showed a particular enthusiasm
for states, cities, and constitutions that appeared to be far better run
than England, then they ran the risk of denigrating their own country
in ways that could be interpreted as treason. Equally, however, a
sense of comparative government obtained through travel taught the
negative lessons of how not to rule and mistakes to avoid (Thomas’s
Historie is full of such examples, notably in his discussion of Naples).
Moreover, as authorities such as Thomas Palmer were at pains to
argue, travellers could be made—indeed, should be made—to serve
the state. When possible, travellers should act as spies, reproducing
maps, charts, and plans which would prove useful to their monarch.9
Palmer is at pains to warn the traveller to police himself constantly,
especially against banished subjects who will try to convert the
unwary. He also argues that some people should not be permitted to
travel—lawyers and women—and warns travellers of the seductive
dangers of Italy (see pp. 15–18, 373–4).
Attacks on travel were, in fact, relatively frequent, the most
celebrated being Roger Ascham’s irascible critique of the ‘Italianate
Englishmen’ in The Scholemaster (1570) (reproduced below).
Ascham felt that travel served less to broaden the mind than to
corrupt the body and soul, and advised those who really wished to
be educated to stay at home and learn about other cultures from the
safety of their studies. A similar attack was later reproduced by
Thomas Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), a work which
relies on the reader’s understanding that the hero, Jack Wilton, has
a number of terrible experiences that are completely unnecessary,
dangerous, and counter-productive. Wilton appears all the more
culpable and foolish because he has been forced to travel to Europe
and has witnessed horrifying events first-hand, so he should have
acquired the knowledge that he is better off at home long before he
actually realizes his errors at the end of the book.10
 Thanks to Jacobean peace with Spain (formalized in 1604), the
early seventeenth century saw the appearance of a number of
travellers who were neither aristocrats nor courtiers preparing for
higher things. Travel had become less a means to an end and more
of an end in itself for writers such as Fynes Moryson, Thomas
Coryat, William Lithgow, George Sandys, and Peter Mundy (all
represented below), and Ascham’s comments clearly failed to deter
them. The problem they all faced was how to publish their work and
make it available for a wide readership. It is probably no accident
that the first travelogues published in the early seventeenth century
(Coryat (1611); Lithgow (1614, 1618, 1632); Sandys (1615);
Moryson (1617)), are all voluminous and eccentric works. It should
also be noted that Moryson and Lithgow both became embittered in
later life as a result of their failure to become as eminent as they felt
their experiences and achievements merited. Moryson’s feelings
were engendered in part by the strenuous efforts he had to
undertake to get his Itinerary published. The substantial volume that
appeared was only a section of his observations and much of what
he wrote remained in manuscript until the twentieth century.11
Intercontinental travel is perhaps easier to deal with as it
generally had a more specific function. The most common reasons
were trade, exploration, the establishment of colonies, and economic
warfare (most frequently, privateering).12 Richard Eden’s lengthy
preface to his translation of Peter Martyr d’Anghera’s Decades of the
Newe Worlde demonstrates that the English were in awe of the
achievements of the Spanish in the Americas. Eden, writing in the
reign of Mary I, argues that the English need to copy the Spanish
with whom they were allied by the queen’s marriage to Philip, who
would become Philip II of Spain in 1556. But if the Spanish served
as an inspiration for writers like Eden, they were later to be counted
as Protestant England’s deadly enemies. Religious struggles and
European politics were never far away from debates about trade or
expansion.
As has often been pointed out, no English colonies were fully
established until the early 1600s with the foundation of Jamestown
(see pp. 294–5, 334–5).13 There was a general fear that if British
colonies were not established in the Americas, then Spain would
control Europe and eventually crush the Protestant Reformation.
Colonies would help to prevent the shipment of silver, gold, and
other precious metals to Spain by providing privateering bases for
English ships.14 As a result, Spain would be unable to dominate
Europe economically, or pay for her huge armies.15 Equally
important for other propagandists of colonialism was the conversion
of indigenous Americans, helping to enlarge Christ’s Protestant
empire, as well as the chance to export difficult and recalcitrant
social elements.
Richard Hakluyt was the most important Elizabethan advocate for
colonization and proponent for an English empire. Included here is
an extract from Hakluyt’s preface to his vast collection of voyages,
The principall navigations, in which he exhorts his fellow-countrymen
to explore and colonize the world and so establish England as a
powerful nation blessed by God.16 National identity and colonial
expansion turn out to be different sides of the same coin. The last
extract included is a result of the work of Hakluyt’s sometime disciple
and collaborator, Samuel Purchas (1575–1626). Purchas’s collection
of voyages, Purchas His Pilgrimes, is even larger than Hakluyt’s and
represented a considerable expansion of the earlier work on its
publication in 1625. As the extracts included here indicate, religion
was still a significant factor in organizing and establishing the
purpose of a voyage.17 However, for Purchas, writing at a time when
the threat to England from Spain had largely receded, the
importance of travel in establishing the nation had largely
disappeared.

See also:
Karl A. E. Enenkel and Jan L. de Jong, eds., Artes Apodemicae and Early Modern
Travel Culture, 1550–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1664: Their Influence in English
Society and Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, rev. edn.).
 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570)
Roger Ascham (1515–68) was a prominent teacher and educator,
notable particularly for his prose works, Toxophilis (1545), a dialogue
on the subject of archery, and the posthumously published The
Schoolmaster (1570), which outlines his pedagogic principles.18
Ascham is included here as a writer who sought to dissuade
aristocrats from sending their sons on educational visits to Europe,
principally Italy, as part of an early form of the ‘Grand Tour’.19
Ascham argued that they would acquire more vices than virtues in
being exposed to the licentiousness of Italian culture and politics,
and the falsehood of its Roman Catholicism. It was more
enlightening to stay at home and read books about Italy. Ascham’s
views are part of a long-running debate in Tudor and Stuart England
and it is likely that the prefaces attached to the works of Coryat and
Purchas are designed as responses to his statement.20

I know diverse noble personages, and many worthy Gentlemen of

England, whom all the Siren songs of Italy could never untwine from
the mast of God’s word: nor no enchantment of vanity overturn
them from the fear of God, and love of honesty.
But I know as many, or more, and some, sometime my dear
friends, for whose sake I hate going into that country the more,
who, parting out of England fervent in the love of Christ’s doctrine,
and well furnished with the fear of God, returned out of Italy worse
transformed, than ever was any in Circe’s Court. I know diverse that
went out of England, men of innocent life, men of excellent learning,
who returned out of Italy, not only with worse manners, but also
with less learning: neither so willing to live orderly, nor yet so liable
to speak learnedly, as they were at home, before they went abroad.
And why? Plato, that wise writer, and worthy traveller himself, telleth
the cause why. He went into Sicilia, a country no nigher Italy by site
of place than Italy that is now, is like Sicilia that was then, in all
corrupt manners and licentiousness of life. Plato found in Sicilia,
every City full of vanity, full of factions, even as Italy is now.21 And
as Homer, like a learned Poet, doth fain that Circe by pleasant
enchantments did turn men into beasts, some into Swine, some into
Asses, some into Foxes, some into Wolves &c. even so Plato, like a
wise Philosopher, doth plainly declare that pleasure, by licentious
vanity, that sweet and perilous poison of all youth, doth engender in
all those that yield up themselves to her, four notorious properties.

1. λήθην
2. δυσμαθίαν
3. ἀϕροσύνην
4. ὕβριν22

The first, forgetfulness of all good things learned before: the second,
dullness to receive either learning or honesty ever after: the third, a
mind embracing lightly the worse opinion and barren of discretion to
make true difference betwixt good and ill, betwixt truth, and vanity:
the fourth, a proud disdainfulness of other good men in all honest
matters. Homer and Plato, have both one meaning, look both to one
end. For, if a man inglutte himself with vanity, or walter23 in filthiness
like a Swine, all learning, all goodness, is soon forgotten. Then
quickly shall he become a dull Ass, to understand wither learning or
honesty: and yet shall he be as subtle as a Fox, in breeding of
mischief, in bringing in misorder, with a busy head, a discoursing
tongue, and a factious heart, in every private affair, in all matters of
state, with this pretty property, always glad to commend the worse
party, and ever ready to defend the falser opinion. And why? For,
where will is given from goodness to vanity, the mind is soon carved
from right judgement, to any fond opinion, in Religion, in Philosophy,
or any other kind of learning. The fourth fruit of vain pleasure, by
Homer and Plato’s judgement, is pride in themselves, contempt of
others, the very badge of all those that serve in Circe’s Court. The
true meaning of both Homer and Plato, is plainly declared in one
short sentence of the holy Prophet of God Hieremie [Jerome], crying
out of the vain and vicious life of the Israelities. This people (sayth
he) be fools and dull-headed to all goodness, but subtle, cunning
and bold, in any mischief, &c. […]24
If some yet do not well understand what is an English man
Italianated, I will plainly tell him. He, that by living and traveling in
Italy, bringeth home into England out of Italy, the Religion, the
learning, the policy, the experience, the manners of Italy. That is to
say, for Religion, Papistry or worse: for learning, less commonly than
they carried out with them: for policy, a factious heart, a discoursing
head, a mind to meddle in all men’s matters: for experience, plenty
of new mischiefs never known in England before: for manners,
variety of vanities, and change of filthy living. These be the
enchantments of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men’s manners in
England: much, by example of ill life, but more by precepts of fond
books, of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every
shop in London, commended by honest titles the sooner to corrupt
honest manners: dedicated over boldly to virtuous and honorable
personages, the easier to beguile simple and innocent wits.
I was once in Italy myself: but I thank God my abode there was
but ix days: And yet I saw in that little time, in one City, more liberty
to sin, than ever I heard tell of in our noble City of London in ix year.
I saw it was there as free to sin, not only without all punishment,
but also without any man’s marking, as it is free in the City of
London to choose, without all blame, whether a man lust to wear
Shoe or pantofle.25 And good cause why: For being unlike in troth of
Religion, they must needs be unlike in honesty of living. For blessed
be Christ, in our City of London commonly the commandments of
God be more diligently taught, and the service of God more
reverently used, and that daily in many private men’s houses, than
they be in Italy once a week in their common Churches: where
masking Ceremonies, to delight the eye, and vain sounds, to please
the ear, do quite thrust out of the Churches all service of God in
spirit and troth. Yea, the Lord Mayor of London, being but a Civil
officer, is commonly for his time more diligent in punishing sin, the
bent enemy against God and good order, than all the bloody
Inquisitors in Italy be in seven year. For their care and charge is not
to punish sin, not to amend manners, not to purge doctrine, but only
to watch and oversee that Christ’s true Religion set no sure footing
where the Pope hath any jurisdiction. I learned, when I was at
Venice, that there it is counted good policy, when there be four or
five brethren of one family, one, only to marry: and all the rest, to
walter with as little shame, in open lechery, as Swine do here in the
common mire. Yea, there be as fair houses of Religion, as great
provision, as diligent officers, to keep up this misorder, as Bridewell26
is, and all the Masters there, to keep down misorder. And therefore,
if the Pope himself do not only grant pardons to further this wicked
purposes abroad in Italy, but also (although this present Pope in the
beginning made some show of misliking thereof) assign both meed27
and merit to the maintenance of stews and brothel-houses at home
in Rome, then let wise men think Italy a safe place for wholesome
doctrine, and godly manners, and a fit school for young gentlemen
of England to be brought up in.
Our Italians bring home with them other faults from Italy, though
not so great as this of Religion, yet a great deal greater than many
good men can well bear. For commonly they come home, common
condemners of marriage and ready persuaders of all other to the
same: not that they love virginity, nor yet because they hate pretty
young virgins, but, being free in Italy to go whither so ever lust will
carry them, they do not like that law and honesty should be such a
bar to their like liberty at home in England. And yet they be the
greatest makers of love, the daily dalliers, with such pleasant words,
with such smiling and secret countenances, with such signs, tokens,
wagers, purposed to be lost, before they were purposed to be made,
with bargains of wearing colours, flours, and herbs, to breed
occasion of ofter meeting of him and her, and bolder talking of this
and that &c. And although I have seen some innocent of all ill, and
stayed in all honesty, that have used these things without all harm,
without all suspicion of harm, yet these knacks were brought first
into England by them that learned them before in Italy in Circe’s
Court: and how Courtly courtesies so ever they be counted now, yet,
if the meaning and manners of some that do use them were
somewhat amended, it were no great hurt, neither to themselves,
nor to others.

Francis Bacon, Letter from Thomas Bodley

(c.1579) and ‘Of Travel’ (1612)
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was a politician, writer, and scientist,
championing an empirical method based on the observation of
natural phenomena and performance of experiments. He had a
meteoric rise as a politician before his career was abruptly ended by
a charge of corruption in 1621. Thereafter, he devoted most of his
attention to writing.
Bacon was in France (1576–9) as part of the entourage of the
English Ambassador, Sir Amias Paulet, where he was educated with
Paulet’s sons, acquiring a knowledge of Roman law. A visit to Italy
was prevented by the queen on religious grounds and Bacon was
forced to return home when his father died in February 1579.
Bodley’s letter to Bacon belongs to this period and can be seen as a
relatively early example of the Ars Apodemica tradition, which
developed from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, whereby a
seasoned older traveller would provide useful advice for the
novice.28 This letter is a particularly useful example of this genre
because, like much gentlemanly travel advice, it was circulated and
recycled: besides Bodley, the same letter has been variously
attributed to Fulke Greville and the Earl of Essex.29
Even though he only travelled abroad to one country, Bacon
thought about travel and its purpose throughout his life. His Essays
were obviously important to their author as three editions were
published in his lifetime; the first edition, containing ten essays,
appeared in 1587 and was reprinted in 1598 and 1606; the second,
containing thirty-eight essays, with many of the originals carefully
revised, appeared in 1612, and was reprinted five times
subsequently; the third, from which the essay ‘Of Travel’ included
here comes (although it was first published in the second edition),
was published in 1625, and contained fifty-eight essays, with further
revisions. It is significant that Bacon saw fit to include an essay on
travel—by which he clearly means European travel—in 1625. By then
the ‘Grand Tour’ had started to become an established part of the
education of many young aristocrats.30 Bacon expects his readers to
enjoy a studious and educational experience, as his suggested
itinerary indicates. Also significant are Bacon’s comments on the
danger of young men changing ‘country manners for those of
foreign parts’, suggesting that Ascham’s fears that travel might
corrupt rather than educate never really went away.31

Letter from Thomas Bodley

My Dear Cousin,
According to your request in your letter dated the 19 October at
Orleans, I received here the 18 of December, I have sent you by
your merchant £30 sterling for your present supply, and had sent
you a greater sum, but that my extraordinary charge this year hath
utterly unfurnished me. And now, Cousin, though I will be no severe
exactor of the account, either of your money or time, yet for the
love I bear you, I am very desirous, both to satisfy myself, and our
friends how you prosper in your travels, and how you find yourself
bettered thereby, either in knowledge of God, or of the world; the
rather, because the days you have already spent abroad, are now
both sufficient to give you light, how to fix yourself and end with
Another random document with
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 Fig. 30.—Didymium difforme. A, two sporangia (spg 1 and 2) on a fragment of
leaf (l); B, section of sporangium, with ruptured outer layer (a), and threads
of capillitium (cp); C, a flagellula with contractile vacuole (c.vac) and
nucleus (nu); D, the same after loss of flagellum; b, an ingested bacillus; E,
an amoebula; F, conjugation of amoebulae to form a small plasmodium; G,
a larger plasmodium accompanied by numerous amoebulae; sp, ingested
spores. (After Lister.)

Again, in some cases the plasmodia themselves aggregate in the

same way as the amoeboids do in the Acrasieae, and combine to
form a compound fruit termed an "aethalium,"[98] with the regions of
the separate plasmodia more or less clearly marked off. The species
formerly termed Aethalium septicum is now known as Fuligo varians.
It is a large and conspicuous species, common on tan, and is a pest
in the tanpits. Its aethalia may reach a diameter of a foot and more,
and a thickness of two inches. Chondrioderma diffusum, often
utilised as a convenient "laboratory type," is common on the
decaying haulms of beans in the late autumn. The interest of this
group is entirely biological, save for the "flowers of tan."[99]

CHAPTER IV
 PROTOZOA (CONTINUED): SPOROZOA[100]

II. Sporozoa.
Protozoa parasitic in Metazoa, usually intracellular for at least part of their
cycle, rarely possessing pseudopodia, or flagella (save in the sperms), never
cilia; reproduction by brood-formation, often of alternating types; syngamy
leading up to resting spores in which minute sickle-germs are formed, or
unknown (Myxosporidiaceae).

This group, of which seven years ago no single species was known
in its complete cycle, has recently become the subject of
concentrated and successful study, owing to the fact that it has been
recognised to contain the organisms which induce such scourges to
animals as malarial fevers, and various destructive murrains. Our
earliest accurate, if partial knowledge, was due to von Siebold,
Kölliker, and van Beneden. Thirty years ago Ray Lankester in
England commenced the study of species that dwell in the blood,
destined to be of such moment for the well-being of man and the
animals in his service; and since then our knowledge has increased
by the labours of Manson, Ross and Minchin at home, Laveran,
Blanchard, Thélohan, Léger, Cuénot, Mesnil, Aimé Schneider in
France, Grassi in Italy, Schaudinn, Siedlecki, L. and R. Pfeiffer,
Doflein in Central Europe, and many others.
 Fig. 31.—Lankesteria ascidiae, showing life-cycle. a, b, c, Sporozoites in
digestive epithelium cells of host; d, e, growth stages; f, free gregarine; g,
association; h, encystment; i, j, brood-divisions in associated mates; k,
pairing-cells; l, syngamy; m, zygote; n, o, p, nuclear divisions in spores; q,
cyst with adult spores, each containing 8 sickle-germs. (After Luhe,
modified from Siedlecki.)

As a type we will take a simple form of the highest group, the

Gregarinidaceae, Monocystis, which inhabits the seminal vesicles of
the earthworm. In its youngest state, the "sporozoite," it is a naked,
sickle-shaped cell, which probably makes its way from the gut into
one of the large radial cells of the seminal funnel, where it attains its
full size, and then passes out into the vesicles or reservoirs of the
semen, to lie among the sperm morulae and young spermatozoa.
The whole interior is formed of the opaque endosarc, which contains
a large central nucleus, and is full of refractive granules of
paramylum or paraglycogen,[101] a carbohydrate allied to glycogen
or animal starch, so common in the liver and muscles of Metazoa;
besides these it contains proteid granules which stain with carmine,
and oil-drops. The ectosarc is formed of three layers: (1) the outer
layer or "cuticle"[102] is, in many cases if not here, ribbed, with
minute pores in the furrows, and is always porous enough to allow
the diffusion of dissolved nutriment; (2) a clear plasmatic layer, the
"sarcocyte"; (3) the "myocyte," formed of "myonemes," muscular
fibrils disposed in a network with transverse meshes, which effect
the wriggling movements of the cell. The endosarc contains the
granules and the large central nucleus. The adult becomes free in
the seminal vesicles; here two approximate, and surround
themselves with a common cyst: a process which has received the
name of "association" (Fig. 31, g-i). Within this, however, the
protoplasms remain absolutely distinct. The nucleus undergoes
peculiar changes by which its volume is considerably reduced. When
this process of "nuclear reduction" is completed, each of the mates
undergoes brood-divisions (j), so as to give rise to a large number of
rounded naked 1-nucleate cells—the true pairing-cells. These unite
two and two, and so form the 1-nucleate spores (k-m), which
become oat-shaped, form a dense cyst-wall, and have been termed
"pseudonavicellae" from their likeness to the Diatomaceous genus
Navicella. Some of the cytoplasm of the original cells remains over
unused, as "epiplasm," and ultimately degenerates, as do a certain
number of the brood-cells which presumably have failed to pair. It is
believed that the brood-cells from the same parent will not unite
together. The contents of each spore have again undergone brood-
division to form eight sickle-shaped zoospores, or "sporozoites" (n-
q), and thus the developmental cycle is completed. Probably the
spores, swallowed by birds, pass out in their excrement, and when
eaten by an earthworm open in its gut; the freed sickle-germs can
now migrate through the tissues to the seminal funnels, in the cells
of which they grow, ultimately becoming free in the seminal vesicles.
[103]

We may now pass to the classification of the group.

A. Telosporidia.—Cells 1-nucleate until the onset of brood-

formation, which is simultaneous.
1. Gregarinidaceae.—Cells early provided with a firm
pellicle and possessing a complex ectosarc; at first
intracellular, soon becoming free in the gut or coelom of
Invertebrates. Pairing between adults, which
simultaneously produce each its brood of gametes,
isogamous or bisexual, which pair within the common
cyst; zygotospores surrounded by a firm cyst, and
producing within a brood of sickle-shaped zoospores.
(i.) Schizogregarinidae.—Multiplying by simple
fission in the free state as well as by brood-
formation; the brood-cells conjugating in a common
cyst, but producing only one pairing nucleus in
each mate (the rest aborting), and consequently
only one spore.
Ophryocystis A. Schn.
(ii.) Acephalinidae.—Cell one-chambered, usually
 without an epimerite for attachment.
Monocystis F. Stein; Lankesteria Mingazzini.
(iii.) Dicystidae.—Cell divided by a plasmic partition;
epimerite usually present.
Gregarina Dufour; Stylorhynchus A. Schn.;
Pterocephalus A. Schn.
2. Coccidiaceae.—Cells of simple structure, intracellular in
Metazoa. Pairing between isolated cells usually
sexually differentiated as oosphere and sperm, the
latter often flagellate. Brood-formation of the adult cell
giving rise to sickle-shaped zoospores (merozoites), or
progamic and producing the gametes. Oosperm motile
or motionless, finally producing a brood of spores,
which again give rise to a brood of sickle-spores.
(i.) Coccidiidae.—Cell permanently intracellular, or
very rarely coelomic, encysting or not before
division; zoospores always sickle-shaped; oosperm
encysting at once, producing spores with a dense
cell-wall producing sickle-germs.
(ii.) Haemosporidae.—Cells parasitic in the blood
corpuscles or free in the blood of cold-blooded
animals, encysting before brood-formation;
zoospores sickle-shaped; oosperm at first motile.
Lankesterella Labbé; (Drepanidium Lank.;)
Karyolysus Labbé; Haemogregarina Danilewski.
(iii.) Acystosporidae.—Cells parasitic in the blood and
haematocytes of warm-blooded Vertebrates; never
forming a cyst-wall before dividing; zoospores
formed in the corpuscles, amoeboid. Gametocytes
only forming gametes when taken into the stomach
of insects. Oosperm at first active, passing into the
coelom, producing naked spores which again
produce a large brood of sickle zoospores, which
 migrate to the salivary gland, and are injected with
the saliva into the warm-blooded host.
Haemamoeba Grassi and Feletti; Laverania Grassi
and Feletti; Haemoproteus Kruse; Halteridium Labbé.
[104]

B. Neosporidia.—Cells becoming multinucleate apocytes

before any brood-formation occurs. Brood-formation
progressive through the apocyte, not simultaneous.
1. Myxosporidiaceae.—Naked parasites in cold-blooded
animals. Spore-formation due to an aggregation of
cytoplasm around a single nucleus to form an
archespore, which then produces a complex of cells
within which two daughter-cells form the spores and
accessory nematocysts.
Myxidium Bütsch.; Myxobolus Bütsch.; Henneguya
Thélohan; Nosema Nageli (= Glugea Th.).
2. Actinomyxidiaceae.[105]—Apocyte resolved into a
sporange, containing eight secondary sporanges (so-
called spores), of ternary symmetry and provided with
three polar nematocysts.
3. Sarcosporidiaceae.—Encysted parasites in the
muscles of Vertebrates, with a double membrane;
spores simple.
Sarcocystis Lankester.

Fig. 32.—Gregarina blattarum Sieb. A, two cephalonts, embedded by their

epimerite (ep), in cells of the gut-epithelium; deu, deutomerite; nu, nucleus;
 pr, protomerite; B1, B2, two free specimens of an allied genus; the epimerite
is falling off in B2, which is on its way to become a sporont; C, cyst (cy) of A,
with sporoducts (spd) discharging the spores (sp), surrounded by an
external gelatinous investment (g). (From Parker and Haswell.)

Monocystis offers us the simplest type of Gregarinidaceae. In most

Gregarines (Figs. 31, 32) the sporozoite enters the epithelium-cell of
the gut of an Arthropod, Worm or Mollusc, and as it enlarges
protrudes the greater part of its bulk into the lumen, and may
become free therein, or pass into the coelom. The attached part is
often enlarged into a sort of grapple armed with spines, the
"epimerite"; this contains only sarcocyte, the other layers being
absent. The freely projecting body is usually divided by an ingrowth
of the myocyte into a front segment ("protomerite"), and a rear one
("deutomerite"), with the nucleus usually in the latter. In this state the
cell is termed a "cephalont." Conjugation is frequent, but apparently
is not always connected with syngamy or spore-formation;
sometimes from two to five may be aggregated into a chain or
"syzygy." The number of cases in which a syngamic process
between two cells has been observed is constantly being increased.
In Stylorhynchus (Fig. 33) the conjugation at first resembles that of
Monocystis, but the actual pairing-cells are bisexually differentiated
into sperms in the one parent, and oospheres in the other; it is
remarkable that here the pear-shaped sperms are apparently larger
than the oospheres. In Pterocephalus the chief difference is that the
sperms are minute.[106] In all cases of spore-formation the epimerite
is lost and the septum disappears; in this state the cell is termed a
sporont. Sometimes the epiplasm of the sporont forms tubes
("sporoducts"), which project through the cyst-wall and give exit to
the spores, as in Gregarina (Fig. 32, C), a parasite in the beetle
Blaps.

Gregarines infest most groups of Invertebrates except Sponges and

perhaps Coelenterates, the only exception cited being that of
Epizoanthus glacialis, a Zoantharian (p. 406). They appear to be
relatively harmless and are not known to induce epidemics.
The Coccidiaceae never attain so high a degree of cellular
differentiation as the Gregarines, which may be due to their habitat;
for in the growing state they are intracellular parasites. Their life-
history shows a double cycle, which has been most thoroughly
worked out in Coccidiidae by Schaudinn and Siedlecki in parasites
of our common Centipedes. We take that of Coccidium schubergi (in
Lithobius forficatus[107]), beginning with the sporozoite, which is
liberated from the spores taken in with the food, in the gut of the
Centipede. This active sickle-shaped cell (Fig. 34, l) enters an
epithelial cell of the mid-gut, and grows therein till it attains its full
size (a), when it is termed a "schizont"; for it segments (Gk. σχίζω, "I
split") superficially into a large number of sickle-shaped zoospores,
the "merozoites" (c), resembling the sporozoites. The segmentation
is superficial, so that there may remain a large mass of residual
epiplasm. The merozoites are set free by the destruction of the
epithelium-cell in which they were formed, and which becomes
disorganised, like the residual epiplasm. Each merozoite may repeat
the behaviour of the sporozoite, so that the disease spreads freely,
and becomes acute after several reinfections. After a time the adult
parasites, instead of becoming schizonts and simply forming
merozoites by division, differentiate into cells that undergo a binary
sexual differentiation. Some cells, the "oocytes" (d, e), escape into
the gut, and the nucleus undergoes changes by which some of its
substance (or an abortive daughter-nucleus) is expelled to the
exterior (f), such a cell is now an "oogamete" or oosphere. Others,
again, are spermatogones (h): each when full grown on escaping
into the gut commences a division (i, j), like that of the schizonts. The
products of this division or segment-cells are the flagellate sperms
(s): they are more numerous and more minute than the merozoites
produced by the schizonts, and are attracted to the oosphere by
chemiotaxy (p. 23), and one enters it and fuses with it (g). The
oosperm, zygote or fertilised egg, thus formed invests itself with a
dense cyst-wall, as a "oospore" (k), its contents form one or more (2,
4, 8, etc.) spores; and each spore forms again one, two, or four
sickle-shaped zoospores ("sporozoites"), destined to be liberated for
a fresh cycle of parasitic life when the spores are swallowed by
another host.
 Fig. 33.—Bisexual pairing of Stylorhynchus. a, Spermatozoon; b-e, fusion of
cytoplasm of spermatozoon and oosphere; f, g, fusion of nuclei; h-j,
development of wall to zygote; k, l, formation of four sporoblasts; l, side
view of spore; m, mature sporozoites in spore. (After Léger.)

Fig. 34.—Life-history of Coccidium schubergi. a, Penetration of epithelium-cell of

host by sporozoite; b-d, stages of multiple cell-formation in naked state
(schizogony); e, f, formation of oogamete; g, conjugation; h-j, formation of
sperms (s); k, development of zygote (fertilised ovum) to form four spores; l,
formation of two zoospores (or sickle germs) in each spore. (From Calkins's
Protozoa, after Schaudinn.)

In some cases the oogametes are at first oblong, like ordinary

merozoites, and round off in the gut. The microgametocyte, or
spermatogone, has the same character, but is smaller; it applies
itself like a cap to one pole of the oogamete, which has rounded off;
it then divides into four sperms, whose cytoplasm is not sharply
separated; one of these then separates from the common mass,
enters the oogamete, and so conjugation is effected, with an
oosperm as its result. This latter mode of conjugation is that of
Adelea ovata and Coccidium lacazei: the former is probably the
more primitive and the commoner. The sperms of Coccidiidae, when
free, usually possess two long flagella, either both anterior, or a very
long one in front and a short one behind, both turned backwards.

The genus Coccidium affects many animals, and one species in

particular, C. cuniculi Rivolta, attacks the liver of young rabbits,[108]
giving rise to the disease "coccidiosis." Coccidium may also produce
a sort of dysentery in cattle on the Alpine pastures of Switzerland;
and cases of human coccidiosis are by no means unknown.
Coccidium-like bodies have been demonstrated in the human
disease, "molluscum contagiosum," and the "oriental sore" of Asia;
similar bodies have also been recorded in smallpox and vaccinia,
malignant tumours and even syphilis, but their nature is not certainly
known; some of these are now referred to Flagellata (see p. 121).

Closely allied to the Coccidiidae are the Haemosporidae, dwellers

in the blood of various cold-blooded Vertebrates,[109] and entering
the corpuscles as sporozoites or merozoites to attain the full size,
when they divide by schizogony; they are freed like those of the next
family by the breaking up of the corpuscle. The merozoites were
described by Gaule (1879) as "vermicles" ("Würmchen"), and
regarded by him as peculiar segregation-products of the blood;
though Lankester had described the same species in the Frog's
blood as early as 1871, with a full recognition of its true character.
His name, Drepanidium, has had to give way, having been
appropriated to another animal, and has been aptly replaced by that
of Lankesterella. The sexual process of Karyolysus has been found
to take place in a Tick, that of Haemogregarina in a Leech, thus
presenting a close analogy to the next group, which only differs in its
less definite form in the active state, and in the lack of a cell-wall
during brood-formation.
Laveran was the first to describe a member of the Acystosporidae,
in 1880, as an organism always to be found in the blood of patients
suffering from malarial fever; this received the rather inappropriate
name of Plasmodium, which, by a pedantic adherence to the laws of
priority, has been used by systematists as a generic name. Golgi
demonstrated the coincidence of the stages of the intermittent fever
with those of the life-cycle of the parasite in the patient, the
maturation of the schizont and liberation of the sporozoites
coinciding with the fits of fever. Manson, who had already shown that
the Nematodes of the blood that give rise to Filarial haematuria (see
Vol. II. p. 149) have an alternating life in the gnats or mosquitos of
the common genus Culex,[110] in 1896 suggested to Ronald Ross
that the same might apply to this parasite, and thus inspired a most
successful work. The hypothesis had old prejudices in its favour, for
in many parts there was a current belief that sleeping under
mosquito-netting at least helped other precautions against malaria.
Ross found early in his investigations that Culex was a good host for
the allied genus Haemoproteus or Proteosoma, parasitic in birds, but
could neither inoculate man with fever nor be inoculated from man.
He found, however, that the malaria germs from man underwent
further changes in the stomach of a "dappled-wing mosquito," that is,
as we have since learned, a member of the genus Anopheles.
Thenceforward the study advanced rapidly, and a number of
inquirers, including Grassi, Koch, MacCallum (who discovered the
true method of sexual union in Halteridium[111]), and Ross himself,
completed his discovery by supplying a complete picture of the life-
cycles of the malaria-germs. Unfortunately, there has been a most
unhappy rivalry as to the priority of the share in each fragment of the
discovery, whose history is summarised by Nuttall, we believe, with
perfect fairness.[112]

The merozoite is always amoeboid, and in this state enters the blood
corpuscle; herein it attains its full size, as a schizont, becoming filled
with granules of "melanin" or black pigment, probably a
decomposition product of the red colouring matter (haemoglobin).
 Fig. 35.—Life-history of Malarial Parasites. A-G, Amoebula of quartan parasite to
sporulation; H, its gametocyte; I-M, amoebula of tertian parasite to
sporulation; N, its gametocyte; O, T, "crescents" or gametocytes of
Laverania; P-S, sperm-formation; U-W, maturation of oosphere; X,
fertilisation; Y, zygote. a, Zygote enlarging in gut of Mosquito; b-e, passing
into the coelom; f, the contents segmented into naked spores; g, the spores
forming sickle-germs or sporozoites; h, sporozoites passing into the salivary
glands. (From Calkins's Protozoa, after Ross and Fielding Ould.)

The nucleus of the schizont now divides repeatedly, and then the
schizont segments into a flat brood of germs (merozoites), relatively
few in the parasite of quartan fever (Haemamoeba malariae, Fig. 35,
E-G), many in that of tertian (H. vivax, Fig. 35, M). These brood-cells
escape and behave for the most part as before. But after the disease
has persisted for some time we find that in the genus Haemamoeba,
which induces the common malarial fevers of temperate regions,
certain of the full-grown germs, instead of behaving as schizonts,
pass, as it were, to rest as round cells; while in the allied genus
Laverania, (Haemomenas, Ross) these resting-cells are crescentic,
with blunt horns, and are usually termed half-moons (Fig. 35, O, T),
characteristic of the bilious or pernicious remittent fevers of the
tropics and of the warmer temperate regions in summer. These
round or crescent-shaped cells are the gametocytes, which only
develop further in the drawn blood, whether under the microscope,
protected against evaporation, or in the stomach of the Anopheles:
the crescents become round, and then they, like the already round
ones of Haemamoeba, differentiate in exactly the same way as the
corresponding cells of Coccidium schubergi. The female cell only
exhibits certain changes in its nucleus to convert it into an oosphere:
the male emits a small number of sperms, long flagellum-like bodies,
each with a nucleus; and these, by their wriggling, detach
themselves from the central core, no longer nucleated. The male
gametogonium with its protruded sperms was termed the "Polymitus
form," and was by some regarded as a degeneration-form, until
MacCallum discovered that a "flagellum" regularly undergoes sexual
fusion with an oosphere in Halteridium, as has since been found in
the other genera. The oosperm (Y) so formed is at first motile
("ookinete"), as it is in Haemosporidae, and passes into the
epithelium of the stomach of the gnat and then through the wall,
acquiring a cyst-wall and finally projecting into the coelom (a-e).
Here it segments into a number of spheres ("zygotomeres" of Ross)
corresponding to the Coccidian spores, but which never acquire a
proper wall (f). These by segmentation produce at their surface an
immense quantity of elongated sporozoites (the "zygotoblasts" or
"blasts" of Ross, Fig. 35, g), these are ultimately freed by the
disappearance of the cyst-wall of the oosperm, pass through the
coelom into the salivary gland (h), and are discharged with its
secretion into the wound that the gnat inflicts in biting. In the blood
the blasts follow the ordinary development of merozoites in the blood
corpuscle, and the patient shows the corresponding signs of fever.
This has been completely proved by rearing the insect from the egg,
feeding it on the blood of a patient in whose blood there were
ascertained to be the germs of a definite species of Haemamoeba,
sending it to England, where it was made to bite Dr. Manson's son,
who had never had fever and whose blood on repeated examination
had proved free from any germs. In the usual time he had a well-
defined attack of the fever corresponding to that germ, and his blood
on examination revealed the Haemamoeba of the proper type. A few
doses of quinine relieved him of the consequences of his mild
martyrdom to science. Experiments of similar character but of less
rigorous nature had been previously made in Italy with analogous
results. Again, it has been shown that by mere precautions against
the bites of Anopheles, and these only, all residents who adopted
them during the malarious season in the most unhealthy districts of
Italy escaped fever during a whole season; while those who did not
adopt the precautions were badly attacked.[113]

Anopheles flourishes in shallow puddles, or small vessels such as

tins, etc., the pools left by dried-up brooks and torrents, as well as
larger masses of stagnant water, canals, and slow-flowing streams.
Sticklebacks and minnows feed freely on the larvae and keep down
the numbers of the species; where the fish are not found, the larvae
may be destroyed by pouring paraffin oil on the surface of the water
and by drainage. A combination of protective measures in Freetown
(Sierra Leone) and other ports on the west coast of Africa, Ismailia,
and elsewhere, has met with remarkable success during the short
time for which it has been tried; and it seems not improbable, that as
the relatively benign intermittent fevers have within the last century
been banished from our own fen and marsh districts, so the Guinea
coast may within the next decade lose its sad title of "The White
Man's Grave."

So closely allied to this group in form, habit, and life-cycle are some
species of the Flagellate genus Trypanosoma, that in their less
active states they have been unhesitatingly placed here (see p. 119).
Schaudinn has seen Trypanosomic characters in the "blasts" of this
group, which apparently is the most primitive of the Sporozoa and a
direct offshoot of the Flagellates.

The Myxosporidiaceae (Fig. 36) are parasitic in various cold-

blooded animals. They are at least binucleate in the youngest free
state, and become large and multinucleate apocytes, which may bud
off outgrowths as well as reproduce by spores. The spores of the
apocyte are not produced by simultaneous breaking up, but by
successive differentiation. A single nucleus aggregates around itself
a limited portion of the cytoplasm, and this again forms a membrane,
becoming an archespore or a "pansporoblast," destined to produce
two spores; within this, nuclear division takes place so as to form
about eight nuclei, two of which are extruded as abortive, and of the
other six, three are used up in the formation of each of the two
spores. Of these three nuclei in each spore, two form nematocysts,
like those of a Coelenterate (p. 246 f.), at the expense of the
surrounding plasm; while the third nucleus divides to form the two
final nuclei of the reproductive body. The whole aggregate of the
reproductive body and the two nematocysts is enveloped in a bivalve
shell. In what we may call germination, the nematocysts eject a
thread that serves for attachment, the valves of the shell open, and
the binucleate mass crawls out and grows afresh. Nosema bombycis
Nägeli (the spore of which has a single nematocyst) is the organism
of the "Pébrine" of the silkworm, which was estimated to have
caused a total loss in France of some £40,000,000 before Pasteur
investigated the malady and prescribed the effectual cure, or rather
precaution against its spread. This consisted in crushing each
mother in water after it had laid its eggs and seeking for pébrine
germs. If the mother proved to be infected, her eggs were destroyed,
as the eggs she had laid were certain to be also tainted. Balbiani
completed the study of the organism from a morphological
standpoint. Some Myxosporidiaceae produce destructive epidemics
in fish.

Fig. 36.—A, Myxidium lieberkühnii, amoeboid phase; B, Myxobolus mülleri,

spore with discharged nematocysts (ntc); C, spores (psorosperms) of a
Myxosporidian. ntc, nematocysts. (From Parker and Haswell.)

The Dolichosporidia or Sarcosporidiaceae are, in the adult state,

elongated sacs, often found in the substance of the voluntary
muscles, and known as "Rainey's" or "Miescher's Tubes"; they are at
first uninucleate, then multinucleate, and then break up successively
into uninucleate cells, the spores, in each of which, by division, are
formed the sickle-shaped zoospores.[114]

CHAPTER V

PROTOZOA (CONTINUED): FLAGELLATA

III. Flagellata.
Protozoa moving (and feeding in holozoic forms) by long flagella:
pseudopodia when developed usually transitory: nucleus single or if multiple
not biform: reproduction occurring in the active state and usually by
longitudinal fission, sometimes alternating with brood-formation in the cyst or
more rarely in the active state: form usually definite: a firm pellicle or distinct
cell-wall often present.

The Flagellates thus defined correspond to Bütschli's group of the

Mastigophora. The lowest and simplest forms, often loosely called
"Monads," are only distinguishable from Sarcodina (especially
Proteomyxa) and Sporozoa by the above characters: their artificial
nature is obvious when we remember that many of the Sarcodina
have a flagellate stage, and that the sperms of bisexual Sporozoa
are flagellate (as are indeed those of all Metazoa except Nematodes
and most Crustacea). Even as thus limited the group is of enormous
extent, and passes into the Chytridieae and Phycomycetes
Zoosporeae on the one hand, and by its holophytic colonial
members into the Algae, on the other.[115]

Classification.
A. Fission usually longitudinal
(transverse only in a cyst), or if
multiple, radial and complete:
pellicle absent, thin, or if armour-
like, with not more than two valves.
I. Food taken in at any part of the
body by pseudopodia 1. PANTOSTOMATA
Multicilia Cienk.; Mastigamoeba F. E. Sch. (Fig. 37, 4).
II. Food taken in at a definite point
or points, or by absorption, or
nutrition holophytic.
1. No reticulate siliceous shell.
Diameter under 500 µ
(1⁄50").
* Contractile vacuole
simple (one or more).
(α) Colourless:
reserves usually
fat: holozoic,
saprophytic or
parasitic 2. Protomastigaceae
(β) Plastids yellow or
brown: reserves
fat or proteid:
nutrition variable:
body naked,
often amoeboid
in active state (C.
nudae), or with a
test, sometimes
containing
calcareous discs
("coccoliths,"
"rhabdoliths") of
peculiar form (C.
loricatae) 3. Chrysomonadaceae
Chromulina Cienk.; Chrysamoeba Klebs;
 Hydrurus Ag. Dinobryon Ehrb. (Fig. 37, 11);
Syncrypta Ehrb. (Fig. 37, 12); Zooxanthella
Brandt; Pontosphaera Lohm.;
Coccolithophora Lohm.; Rhabdosphaera
Haeck.
(γ) Green, (more
rarely yellow or
brown) or
colourless:
reserves starch:
fission
longitudinal 4. Cryptomonadaceae
Cryptomonas Ehrb. (Fig. 37, 9); Paramoeba
Greeff.
(δ) Green (rarely
colourless):
fission multiple,
radial 5. Volvocaceae
** System of contractile
vacuoles complex,
with accessory
formative vacuoles or
reservoir, or both.
(ε) Pellicle delicate or
absent:
pseudopodia
often emitted:
excretory pore
distinct from
flagellar pit:
reserves fat 6. Chloromonadaceae
Chloramoeba Lagerheim; Thaumatomastix,
Lauterborn.
(ζ) Pellicle dense, 7. Euglenaceae
 tough or hard,
often wrinkled or
striate: contractile
vacuole
discharging by
the flagellar pit.
Nutrition variable
Euglena Ehrb.; Astasia Duj. (Fig. 37, 3);
Anisonema Duj.; Eutreptia Perty (Fig. 42, p.
124); Trachelomonas Ehrb. (Fig. 37, 1);
Cryptoglena Ehrb.
2. Skeleton an open network of
hollow siliceous spicules.
Plastids yellow. Diameter
under 500 µ. 8. Silicoflagellata
Dictyocha Ehrb.
3. Diameter over 500 µ. Mouth
opening into a large
reticulate endoplasm:
flagella 1, or 2, very
unequal. 9. Cystoflagellata
Noctiluca Suriray (Fig. 48); Leptodiscus R. Hertw.
B. Fission oblique or transverse: flagella
two, dissimilar, the one coiled round
the base of the other or in a
traverse groove; pellicle often
dense, of numerous armour-like
plates 10. Dinoflagellata
Ceratium Schrank; Gymnodinium Stein; Peridinium Ehrb. (Fig.
46); Pouchetia Schütt; Pyrocystis Murray (Fig. 47); Polykrikos
Bütschli.
The Protomastigaceae and Volvocaceae are so extensive as to
require further subdivision.

Protomastigaceae
I. Oral spots 2. Flagella distant in pairs. Distomatidae
II. Oral spot 1 or 0.
A. Flagellum 1.
(a) No anterior process: often
parasitic Oikomonadidae
Oikomonas K. (Figs. 37, 2, 8); Trypanosoma Gruby
(Fig. 39, a-f); Treponema Vuill. (Fig. 39, g-i).
(b) Anterior process unilateral or
proboscidiform: cell often
thecate Bicoecidae
Bicoeca Clark; Poteriodendron St.
(c) Anterior process a funnel,
surrounding the base of the
flagellum: cells often
thecate.
(i.) Funnel free Craspedomonadidae
Codosiga Clark; Monosiga Cl.; Polyoeca Kent;
Proterospongia Kent; Salpingoeca Cl.
(ii.) Funnel not emerging
from the general
gelatinous investment Phalansteridae
B. Flagella 2, unequal or dissimilar in
function, the one sometimes
short and thick.
(a) Both flagella directed
forwards Monadidae