![]() ![]() It seems appropriate to celebrate it this year, the 400th anniversary of the death of the man who compiled it almost single-handedly, and in the process helped to lay the foundations of a moderately-sized island nation’s rather disproportional global influence and presence in the furthest corners of the world. In years that followed, The Principal Navigations would become, in many ways, a cornerstone of Britain’s imperial ambitions, but it also serves as a unique record of figures and voices, of lives and experiences like that of Samson Rowlie, that could so easily otherwise have been lost. Harborne’s letter to the English renegade working behind the scenes of Ottoman government comes to us within the pages of what is perhaps the greatest collection of travel writing ever to be put together in any language, with a title as sonorous as the ambition behind it: The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation: Made by Sea or Over Land to the Most Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compasse of These 1500 Years: Divided into Three Several Parts According to the Positions of the Regions Whereunto They Were Directed the First Containing the Personall Travels of the English unto Indæa, Syria, Arabia … the Second, Comprehending the Worthy Discoveries of the English Towards the North and Northeast by Sea, as of Lapland … the Third and Last, Including the English Valiant Attempts in Searching Almost all the Corners of the Vaste and New World of America … Whereunto is Added the Last Most Renowned English Navigation Round About the Whole Globe of the Earth. The sketch of Assan Aga AKA Samson Rowlie / Hassan Agha ![]() Rowlie of Bristow merchant, taken in the Swalow.” Within its pages, a whole history of adventure, captivity, and transformation of a young man from Bristol, Samson Rowlie, son of Francis Rowlie, is condensed in a single terse headnote: “To Assan Aga, Eunuch & Treasurer to Hassan Bassa king of Alger, which Assan Aga was the sonne of Fran. But thirteen years after Harborne wrote his letter, an English book would preserve at least a trace of who he was and who he used to be. #6815 ortelius fullHe is only seen again, looking back at the viewer in full Turkish costume, in a chance portrait made two years later (ca. Neither do we know what happened to Assan Aga, the recipient of that letter. We do not know whether the prisoners received their freedom. In return, he would be assured of the favour of Elizabeth I and the gratitude of Harborne and his countrymen, “wherby both my selfe & others in that place having found you in all good offices faithfully affectionated, may in like case performe the like towards you, when & where you may have occasion to use me”. #6815 ortelius freeReferring to the Biblical story of Joseph and his brothers in Egypt, “I trust you be ordained another Joseph”, he writes, “to folow his example in true pietie, in such sort that notwithstading your body be subject to Turkish thraldom, yet your vertuous mind free fro those vices”. His letter was addressed instead to the Beglerbeg’s Eunuch and Treasurer, Assan Aga, and he wrote as one Englishman to another. Harborne’s efforts to free the English prisoners had already made him deeply unpopular with the Beglerbeg, but Harborne was not writing to him. The person who would decide the fate of the prisoners was Uluç Ali Pasha, the Ottoman governor (or Beglerbeg of Algiers), himself a European Christian renegade, a Calabrian who had risen from the rank of an Ottoman oar slave to become the hero of the Battle of Lepanto and the Ottoman High Admiral. ![]() It was a tricky matter that he was trying to negotiate - the release of a few Englishmen taken prisoner by the Ottomans. In June 1586, William Harborne, the first English ambassador to the Ottoman court at Istanbul, wrote a letter. As well as the escapades of famed names such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, Nandini Das looks at how the book preserves many stories of lesser known figures that surely would have been otherwise lost. ![]() The Principle Navigations, Richard Hakluyt’s great championing of Elizabethan colonial exploration, remains one of the most important collections of English travel writing ever published. Colour version of Abraham Ortelius’ Typus Orbis Terrarum, a map inserted into the first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations (1589) / Wikimedia Commons ![]()
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