An Introduction to the New Edition of <i>The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James</i>

Although Canada's James Bay is a well-known geographical feature, it is not widely known that it is named for an early modern explorer, Thomas James, nor that James wrote a lengthy narrative following his overwintering on an island in the Bay during his attempt to discover a Northwest Passage to Cathay in 1631-32.This was not always the case: from its publication in 1633 to the early nineteenth century, The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James was the British public's primary source of information about what we now know as the Canadian north, and James himself was figured as a hero.James and his Voyage deserve to be returned to a central position in the history of British exploration in Canada.The first full-length narrative of northern exploration, the Voyage plays a crucial role in the representation of the north, occupying a key place in the history of that representation; it appeared as Scholastic thought and practice were fading and the epistemology and methods of the new philosophy were in the ascendency.James's text offers a window into this historical moment: it engages at the same time with medieval and early modern tropes of the north and the early modern imperative to re-establish the grounds of knowledge on observation and experience.The subsequent dearth of exploration to the north, possibly caused by James's assurance that a Northwest Passage could not possibly exist, ensured that the Voyage remained the canonical narrative of northern discovery.Although there were a few desultory attempts for the Northwest Passage in the eighteenth century, the narratives that resulted did not capture the imagination of the reading public, and though the Hudson's Bay Company began toThe Marvellous North of Medieval and Early Modern EuropeThe north was a mysterious region to Europeans of the Middle Ages, for whom the Mediterranean was the centre of the world.In fact, who located the site of Lucifer's throne in the north.Beginning with Origen in the third century, 4 the patristic writers of the early Christian Church explained the origin of evil through key passages in the biblical books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job, and Ezekiel.Following Isaiah 14.12-14, it was understood that, after the Fall, Lucifer had established his throne in the north.5 The identification of the north as a locus of evil in passages from the books of Jeremiah, Job, and Ezekiel confirmed the belief that the north was Lucifer's realm.6 Medieval and early modern English writers drew on the patristic texts in their representations of the north, and the story of the rebel angels and the fall of Lucifer as propagated in these works was a chief theme of Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry.7 Anglo-Saxon writers exploited the tradition in their responses to the Viking raids of the seventh to ninth centuries.8 The prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah had warned that the wrath of God toward the sins of his people would find retribution in their persecution by northern races.This resonated with writers such as Aelfric, Wulfstan, and Byhrtferth, whose works engaged deeply with the Viking threat to Anglo-Saxon society.9 In his Latin Life of St. Oswald, Byhrtferth quotes Jeremiah 25.8-9, 10 and he warns the Anglo-Saxons that God would "send and take all the kindreds of the north, and […] bring them against this land, and against the inhabitants thereof."Wulfstan, too, invokes Isaiah and the threat from the north in this context, suggesting that Isaiah provides a cogent warning to his audience.11 Medieval vision literature expounded imaginatively on the meteorology of Hell.12 Some early Christian commentators held that, when * Notes for the introduction appear at the end of this chapter, rather than in the notes section in this volume's endmatter. The North of the New PhilosophersThe search for the Northwest Passage that engaged England for just over four centuries was the result of a Papal Bull issued on 4 May 1493 by Alexander VI.The Pope divided the Atlantic between the Spaniards and the Portuguese via a line drawn 370 Spanish miles to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, effectively preventing the rest of Europe from gaining access to the treasures of the recently discovered lands.The lands south and west of this line (what we now know as America, then still considered to be India) were declared Spanish possessions, and the lands south and east (around Africa to India) Portuguese.44 It occurred to the English that they could claim the (as yet undiscovered) lands outside of the lands belonging to Spain and Portugal.45 It seemed entirely natural to claim the rights to any territories discovered in their own hemisphere; 46 according to some, these rights had already been established by the conquests of King Arthur and other early Britons.47 The theory of the existence of a Northwest Passage to Asia was advanced and began to gain currency.Surely a ship could pass to the other side of the New World by following a route along the top of the newly discovered continent, allowing Englishmen to claim lands as yet unclaimed and to gain access to the riches of Cathay.48 Mercantile aims merged with developments in the study of natural philosophy as those who were interested in the north began to demand experiential accounts of the region to replace or augment classical and medieval theories.Resistance to the practices of Scholasticism, a form of Aristotelian philosophy and the predominant philosophy of the universities, or "Schools," in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, began to gather and find expression in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The "Schoolmen," or Scholastic philosophers, founded their theories of the operation of the natural world on the works of the classical thinkers, particularly those of Aristotle.They came to their […] beyonde [Iceland], so cold it is, No man may there abyde.This See is called the great Occyan, So great it is that never man Coude tell it sith the worlde began […][…] And that contrey is so large of rome, Muche lenger than all cristendome, Without fable or gyle;For dyvers mariners have it tried And sayled streyght by the coste side Above five thousand myle.(731-5; 741-6) Another consideration for a ground of Trade, ought to be the nature of it, with whom, and for what we trade, and which trade is more principally to be nourished, which out of doubt are the Northerne Trades, which are the root of all other, because the materials brought from those parts, as from Wx, Muscove, Norway, Prussia, and Livonia, are fundamentall and of absolute necessity; for from these Trades, wee get the material of Shipping,

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.