Annual Report

1975

Journal G 161 H34 1975

[London: The Hakluyt Society]

Esmond de Beer joined the Hakluyt Society in 1946, and was its President between 1972 and 1978. In editing Evelyn’s Diary and The Correspondence of John Locke, he demanded of himself sound scholarship and research. He applied this rigour to the Society’s publications; there was no room for slipshod writing or muddled thinking. As a consequence, not a single volume was published during his Presidency. However, after the backlog was cleared in 1982, the Society could look back and affirm: ‘[de Beer’s] scholarship made a great deal of difference to their final texts, although it delayed (but rightly so) their publication’ (E.M.J. Campbell, Annual Report, 1990). De Beer’s talk ‘The Literature of Travel in the Seventeenth Century’ represents something of his interest in travel and discovery.