Samuel Purchas

Samuel Purchas (1577? – 1626), an English cleric, published several volumes of reports by travellers to foreign countries.

Purchas was born at Thaxted, Essex, son of an English yeoman. He graduated from St John's College, Cambridge, in 1600. In 1604 James I presented him to the vicarage of St. Laurence and All Saints, in Eastwood, Essex. Eastwood is two miles from Leigh-on-Sea, which was then a prosperous shipping center and a congregational place of seafaring men. Purchas himself never travelled "200 miles from Thaxted in Essex where I was borne." Instead, he recorded personal narratives shared with him by the sailors, who returned to England from their voyages. He added these accounts to a vast compilation of unsorted manuscripts, which were left to him by Richard Hakluyt and were later published as Purchas's third - and final - book. In 1614, Purchas became chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot and rector of St Martin, Ludgate, London. He held a Bachelor of Divinity degree, and with this degree was admitted at Oxford University in 1615.

In 1613 he published Purchas His Pilgrimage: or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discovered, from the Creation unto this Present. In this work, intended as an overview of the diversity of God's creation from an Anglican world-view, he presented several abbreviated travel stories he would later publish in full. The book achieved immediate popularity and went through four editions between 1613 and 1626, the year of Purchas's death.

His second book, Purchas his Pilgrim or Microcosmus, or the Historie of Man. Relating the Wonders of his Generation, Vanities in his Degeneration, Necessities of his Regenerations, was published in 1619.

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