Sarah Tyacke in North America

























Sarah Tyacke's Visit to North America

As part of a campaign to promote the Hakluyt Society to potential supporters in North America and elsewhere, the Council of the Hakluyt Society sent one of our trustees, Sarah Tyacke, to meet and speak with our American colleagues. These included our official American representative, Edward Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library; Susan Danforth and other staff and fellows of the Library; Daniel Bennett, the president, and Ronald Rosner, the chair of the library and archives committee of the Explorers Club of New York; Ralph Ehrenberg and Tom Sander, presidents, now past and current respectively, of the Society for the History of Discoveries.


The Society for the History of Discoveries was holding its Annual Meeting at the Newberry Library in Chicago on the occasion of the Nebenzahl Lectures, 8-10 November, and the opening of the Chicago Festival of Maps in institutions across the city. This was one of the largest number of map exhibitions ever seen in one city, and was crowned by the mammoth exhibition in the Field Museum: ‘Maps: Finding our Place in the World’. This exhibition includes some very famous map treasures from the Vatican Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Library and elsewhere.

Sarah delivered talks relevant to the work of the Hakluyt Society to a seminar at the John Carter Brown Library, to the members of the Explorers Club of New York, and to the Annual General Meeting of the Society of the History of Discoveries. In her talk to the SHD, titled ‘Discovering maps and texts anew’, she discussed the importance of understanding the wider historical context of the text and of the map and of the two genres produced together in any critical analysis.

The American Friends generously hosted a reception in honour of the Hakluyt Society in Chicago at which the work of the Society and of the American Friends was explained to a receptive audience by the secretary, Clare Flemming. The good working relationship between the Hakluyt Society and its institutional and individual supporters in the United States were very much enhanced.


Photograph: Sarah giving her lecture ‘Cathay and the Way Thither: the Northern Passages 1550-1650’ at the Explorers Club on 6 November 2007.