A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World is a 17-volume compilation of travel narratives assembled by the Scottish historian and poet John Pinkerton (1758‒1826), first published in Great Britain in 1808‒14. A contemporary and acquaintance of the historian Edward Gibbon and the novelist Sir Walter Scott, Pinkerton wrote books on Scottish history and poetry, numismatics, and other topics, as well as his own plays and poems. Many of the narratives were newly translated into English from French, German, Dutch, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and other European languages. Each volume is illustrated with plates. A six-volume American edition of Pinkerton’s collection of voyages was published in Philadelphia in 1810‒12. Shown here is the fourth volume of the original London edition, which includes narratives of travel by Europeans to France. The first account is “A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698” by Dr. Martin Lister, an English naturalist and physician. It is followed by Travels During the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, Undertaken More Particularly with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France by agricultural reformer Arthur Young, which takes up most of the volume. The last two narratives concern mountains: Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s “An Account of the Attempts that Have Been Made to Attain the Summit of Mont Blanc,” written in 1786; and Louis-François Ramond’s “Journey to the Summit of Mont Perdu,” dating from 1797.
