The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the… (1600)

The Wheatley Medal, which is awarded annually on the recommendation of a joint committee of the Library Association and the Society of Indexers for an outstanding index published in the preceding year, was awarded for 1965 to Mrs. Alison Quinn for her index to The principall navigations voiages and discoveries of the English nation by Richard Hakluyt.This edition is a photo-lithographic facsimile published for the Hakluyt Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem at the University Press, Cambridge (10 gns.). The original was published in 1589 and has never been reprinted, and might well have remained available only to scholars but for the development of modern methods of photographic reproduction. This edition, in two volumes (including the index), in addition to the facsimile reproduction of the original text in the black-letter type, has an introduction, in modern type, by Professor Quinn and Mr. R. A. Skelton, and a remarkable index, also in modern type, by Mrs. Alison Quinn. The index covers all the material in the Elizabethan text (835 pages) and in the Introduction (52 pages) and itself occupies 140 pages. It appears, at first sight, to be a single index arranged in the usual alphabetical order. But closer inspection reveals that it is constructed on a most ingenious plan, reminiscent of the well-known Chinese box. Mrs. Quinn's index is an analysis that combines with the analytic framework a large number of subsidiary indexes, each one of which constitutes a review of all the material in the text dealing with its special subject. Mrs. Quinn cross-refers from cloak to clothing, and sometimes takes it still further as when, for instance, she cross-refers from cloth to commodities. The entry under commodities occupies more than 17 columns (nearly six pages in the index) and constitutes a complete survey, in alphabetical order, of all the commodities mentioned by Hakluyt and thus of virtually all the commodities known to the Elizabethans. Such an arrangement, combining synthesis within analysis, is perfect for this special text which is one of the more famous works of Elizabethan history and literature and, as such, a source book for scholars, writers, scientists, thinkers and journalists everywhere in the world. Mrs. Quinn was dealing with barely accessible material, as far as the ordinary reader is concerned; and her index is outstanding for the intelligent, imaginative, and scholarly way in which she has solved the intractable problems such material must inevitably present to the indexer.