The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James: A Critical Edition ed. by Colleen M. Franklin (review)

Abstract

Colleen M. Franklin, ed. The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James: A Critical Edition. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's up, 2014. 243 pp. $100. When early modern travel literature was experiencing a kind of critical renaissance in the mid 2000s, Julia Schleck pointed out how many narratives discussing the implications of early modern travel relied too heavily on certain canonical sources. Schleck argued in part that the reliance of contemporary critics to draw primarily from Hakluyt's collection of travel narratives potentially reinscribes a narrative colonialism. From here, she suggests that the recontextualization of these narratives that modernizes them destroys the early modern readers. While Coleen M. Franklin's critical edition of Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James is slightly past the historical context of Hakluyt's work (his last work Principall Navigations was published in 1600; James's text is published in 1633), her work sidesteps the problem of narrative colonialism by contextualizing the historical reception of the text and providing access and critical context for an important early modern narrative. Franklin's stated goals are to present a text as faithfully as she could (and to that end she changes little of the source text) and to make the text available and accessible to academic and interested amateur alike. In pointing out the substantial influence James's work had on many artists, and the notes and introduction she provides, Franklin presents a text that achieves both of her stated goals and avoids destroying the context with modernization. In spite of the surge in academic interest in early modern travel literature, few printed critical editions like Franklin's have emerged. Scholars have often relied on texts collected by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas. These collections can be difficult to navigate, especially Purchas, but in the early twentieth century J. M. Dent and H. G. Rawlinson produced impressive yet problematical reprintings of Hakluyt's and Purchas's collections. The Hakluyt Society has also been active in publishing travel narratives, but few of these offer as sustained a critical study as Franklin's critical edition. The scarcity of print critical editions can in part be explained by the rise of Internet technology and websites like Early English Books Online. Franklin describes the significant difficulties of finding a good, readable copy of Strange and Dangerous Voyage, and her stated goal to produce a text in a state much like what readers in the seventeenth century would have experienced would certainly be destroyed by hypertext. Another significant value of Franklin's text, aside from those who wish to dispense with the fetish of digital for the haptic pleasure of a printed book, is its introduction (the text of the introduction is 126 pages long with 274 endnotes). Here Franklin traces the reception history of James's text, delineating public interest in Strange and Dangerous Voyage to its present reception, and posits the direction of future scholarship. The text is broken into four primary parts: a critical introduction, James's text (including appendices from James on longitude, a note to divinity scholars at Cambridge, and a list of nautical instruments he used), and substantial notes on James's text. Franklin also includes appendices of nautical terms, names of persons and places referred to in James's text, and a bibliography of critical works on James. Strange and Dangerous Voyage is a part of a very large corpus of texts describing the search for a northwest passage. While he, of course, failed in his attempt, the narrative of his voyage was popular during his lifetime, as was interest in the discovery of a northwest passage, and remained popular for many years after his death. Franklin's introduction begins with medieval perspectives of the north and how they potentially influenced James's writing. …