India in the Fifteenth Century

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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India.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 1857 volume is a compilation, edited by R. H. Major of the British Museum, of narratives of journeys to India 'in the century preceding the Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope; from Latin, Persian, Russian, and Italian sources'. India was regarded as a fabled source of riches even before the time of Alexander the Great, and Major's introduction surveys the surviving accounts of overland journeys there before the fifteenth century, assessing their validity and where possible matching ancient to modern place names.