Our three minute speaker this week was Treasurer, Rotarian Chris Angerer. The text of Chris' speech follows:
Hakluyt Society
I am a travel addict.
The type of travel that allows you to immerse yourself into different countries, cultures, landscapes and flora and fauna.
Soaking up history and environment in other societies allows us to broaden our horizons and permits us to see our world and problems from an enlarged perspective.
A number of years ago I joined the Hakluyt Society.
Richard Hakluyt was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, and a friend of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. He frequented the docks in London to collect and publish the records and experiences of adventurers and explorers. He published a comprehensive almanac of exploration at the end of the 16th century.
The Hakluyt Society was formed in 1846 in London and has as its object the advancement of knowledge and education in relation to understanding of world history.
It publishes the diaries, logs and experiences of voyages and travels of people throughout the centuries and the globe. The HS is a registered Charity.
Dr Martin Woods, curator of maps at the Australian Library in Canberra is its Australian President.
Examples of the stories published include:
* Joao Rodrigues', a Jesuit monk, account of 16th Century Japan. Joao was a confidant of the first shoguns and spend 50 years in Japan and China from 1577 to 1626.
* The account of the travels and embassy of four Japanese youths of nobility to Europe and the Vatican in 1580, including their audiences and visits to King Phillip II, the Medici family, the Pope and Venice’s city fathers.
* Robert Schaumbergcks' travels on foot and by canoe through the rainforest, savannahs and along the great rivers of Guiana in the 1830s and 40s. (His brother Richard became the curator of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Adelaide).
* John Narborough’s log of his surveying of Patagonia and the Magellan Strait in the 1670s.
* Semen Deznev, a Russian soldier sailing from the North Siberian coast into the Pacific, discovering what later became known as the Bering Strait in 1648.
* Pedro Paes history of 16th Century Ethiopia
* Midshipman Poynter’s diary of the discovery of the South Shetland Islands in 1820
* Alessandro Malaspina’s logs and diaries of the surveying and mapping of the whole American west coast up to Alaska’s Prince William Sound. In his travels he also spend time in the fledgling colony of NSW around 1790 and was a guest of the governour.
* Irish and British settlement of the Amazon between 1555 and 1646
These and so many more providing wonderful insights into the exploration of our world.
