Colonial Despatches

Samuel Purchas was an English geographical editor and clergyman, who compiled narratives of English navigators and explorers of the West into a volume titled Hakluyt's Posthumus, or Purchas, his Pilgrimes.1

The Pilgrimes consists of four volumes, based off Hakluyt's papers, containing oral and written narratives of travels across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. North and South America are covered in the third and fourth volumes.2

Purchas was born to George and Anne Purchas, and was baptized on November 20, 1577 in Thaxted, Essex. After education at St. John's College in Cambridge, he married Jane Lease on December 2, 1601, and together they had three children. Purchas died in the fall of 1626.3

Other published works by Purchas include Purchas, his Pilgrimage (1613), The Historie of Man (1619), and The King's Towre (1623).4

• 1. Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography.
• 2. David Armitage, Purchas, Samuel Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
• 3. Ibid.
• 4. Ibid.