Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana

[Dave Monroe]

Lorimer, Joyce.  Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie
   of Guiana.  Burlington, VT: Asgate, 2007.

Sir Walter Ralegh's account of his 1595 expedition to
the Orinoco in search of the fabled empire of El
Dorado was an immediate publishing success and is one
of the most important pieces of Elizabethan travel
literature. This edition presents, on facing pages,
the annotated texts of a previously unpublished copy
of Ralegh's fair manuscript draft of The Discoverie of
the Large, Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana and the
subsequent printed versions, and demonstrates very
clearly how Sir Robert Cecil and Ralegh's few other
serious backers induced the reluctant author to alter
his manuscript for publication.

Lively tales of Amazon women, drinking bouts and
swash-buckling adventures, which would have fascinated
armchair travellers, were firmly deleted. The focus of
his appeal to investors was shifted from an ephemeral
golden empire to actual gold mines to which, as his
manuscript shows, he had originally paid little
attention and for which he had very little evidence.
In effect Ralegh was forced to develop a strategy to
mediate between what he believed to exist and what he
actually found, between his dreams of what he might
accomplish and the real obstacles which faced him in
the field, between his creative, imaginative response
to his recent journey and the need to present it in
such a way as to encourage others to undertake another
such journey with him.

The materials collected in the appendices indicate
that while men like John Ley were immediately inspired
to explore Guiana, bringing back fabulous tales of
monstrous peoples, Ralegh lost interest until he saw a
chance to free himself from imprisonment in the Tower
by inventing stories of Orinoco gold mines which he
had never mentioned in either the draft or the
published version of The Discoverie.

https://www.ashgate.com/shopping/title.asp?isbn=0%20904180%2087%205#


 
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