Abstract
The literature of travel in the eighteenth century
is an uncharted ocean which seems to have repelled explorers by its very vastness and by the ungenial climate
which is thought to prevail in the latitudes wherein it
lies. Yet this literature . which is so forbidding to
modern reader, enjoyed such popularity in its own
day that Shaftesbury, writing in 1710, could speak of
Travels as "the chief materials to furnish out a library ", and declare that "these are in our present
days what books of chivalry were in our forefathers' ".
His statement is literally true; during the later
years of the 17th century and throughout the 18th
century, books of travel poured from the press; and it
would seem that the native accounts of actual voyages
were not sufficient to satisfy the public demand,
for translations of foreign works appeared in prodigious
numbers.
