On Ravenstein's Edition of Battell's Adventures in Angola and Loango

I

Between 1590 and ca. 1610 the English sailor Andrew Battell lived in Central Africa, first in Angola until 1606/07 and then in Loango. His reports about these lands are a priceless source for the otherwise poorly documented history of Angola between ca. 1590-1606, especially since his is the only known eyewitness account about the way of life of the notorious Jaga. He actually lived with one of their bands supposedly for at least twenty months (26-27).¹ In addition his account is also one of the very earliest about Loango. Hence modern historians of Angola and Loango have relied extensively on him. They all, myself included, have used the text edition by E.G. Ravenstein of The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell of Leigh (London, 1901) and did so without referring back to the original documents. These are, first Battell's information in Samuel Purchas' Purchas His Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discovered from the Creation unto the Present (London, 1613), and later, the more detailed "The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell" in Samuel Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, 1625), also known as Hakluytus posthumus after its frontispiece.² Given the absolute reliance of modern scholars on Ravenstein, it is worthwhile to evaluate its reliability compared to the original publications.

II

Ravenstein's edition is not up to modern standards even though it nearly flawlessly renders the original main text . But he omits the pagination and the line numbers of the editions he used, he modernizes the spelling of the originals, and he does not state clearly that he added all the titles and everything else within square brackets. But these are minor blemishes compared to his other omissions and additions. He omits the headings at the top of each page which list a summary of the subjects discussed on that page. He omits nearly all the numerous marginal comments in the original and when he cites such a note, he only quotes a part of it, without indicating this in any way. He even occasionally splits paragraphs in two or three new ones. Most misleadingly however is his division of the text into arbitrary sections consisting of one or several paragraphs, for which he provides his own titles.

Finally he makes a mess of the long commentary in italics at the end of the original text of "The Strange Adventures," which was added by Purchas. Ravenstein mistakenly presents the first paragraph of this commentary as a marginal note (68-69), but then prints the following two paragraphs as if they were part of the main text, whereas they are but the continuation of Purchas' commentary. The main text therefore ends with "creatures, with robbery, exile, death." (68/11). The cumulative effect of all of the preceding is to completely disfigure the appearance of the original publications and the messages this sends to the reader. Moreover, Ravenstein printed the two sources in reverse chronological order; that is, he prints the 1625 "Adventures" first and then only the relevant passages in Pilgrimage 1613, In effect this veils any relevance this chronology might have.

Moreover, it stands to reason that after a century of use Ravenstein's annotation of the text are out of date. This alone would warrant a new text edition. In the same way, his introduction to the text edition has become quite inadequate today. Indeed it was already somewhat flawed when it was written. Thus in principle it would be desirable to produce a wholly new edition of this important text, Yet this is not likely to happen in any near future. Hence it is useful to provide faute de mieux an additional introduction for users of the Ravenstein edition.

III

For the following discussion–and as no manuscript of the original manuscripts has survived—I have used the printed texts of chapters 9 and 10 of the fourth edition of Pilgrimage (London, 1626), 765-72 and of The Strange Adventures…in Pilgrimes (London, 1625), 970-85. Let us first tackle the issue of authorship...