The image used on our home page for “Voyages before 1700” is a woodcut from “An Invitation to Lubberland”, a late-17th-century ballad in the Roxburghe Collection at the British Library. Christian Algar has posted anexcellent piece on it.
Lubberland is a place of dreams, where ‘streets are pavd with pudding-pies,’ and ‘hot roasted pigs’ that ‘run up and down, still crying out, Come eat me’. ‘The rivers run with claret fine, the brooks with rich canary’. ‘Hot custards grows on eery tree, each ditch affords rich jellies’.
Such could be the rewards for early voyagers with vivid imaginations.
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