Locke and Travel literature

By the time of his death, Locke owned one of the largest collections
of travel literature ever assembled in Britain. It comprised 195 books,
including the massive collections of Ramusio, de Bry, Thévenot, Hakluyt,
Purchas, and the accounts of the voyages of Hariot to Virginia,
de Léry to Brazil, Sandys to the Ottoman Empire, Gage to the West
Indies, and Choisy to Siam. His library also hosted accounts of minor
voyages, many volumes of maps and a set of ethnographic illustrations
“of the inhabitants of severall remote parts of the world espetially the
East Indies”1. Locke’s works, journals and commonplace books bear witness
to his great interest in travel accounts, and the enormous impact
the reading of them had on the development of his views on human nature,
social custom, religion, ritual, comparative government, coinage,
medicine, and many other matters. Numerous scholars have investigated
the reasons underlying Locke’s enthusiasm for travel accounts, which he
seems to have regarded more as a locus of potentially useful information
than as a source of entertainment. The contributions in the volume shed new light on this.