The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This book contains three accounts of Dutch voyages in search of a north-eastern passage to China, undertaken in the 1590s. (When this Hakluyt edition was published in 1853, continuing anxiety about the fate of Sir John Franklin's expedition made any accounts of Arctic exploration extremely topical.) The Dutch were not successful in establishing a north-east passage; but the stories of the expeditions and of the courage and endurance of the men who took part in them make for fascinating reading.
