SOURCE: Wright, Louis B. “Samuel Purchas and the Heathen.” In Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion 1558-1625, pp. 115-33. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1943.

In the following essay, Wright examines the most famous works of Purchas, how and why he came to write them, and the enormous impact they had on his audience.

On a summer's day in 1797, the Reverend Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought relief from the toothache by taking a dose of opium and reading the works of his brother cleric, the Reverend Samuel Purchas. From the modern point of view, one could hardly find a book better calculated to put one to sleep than Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613), the volume which Coleridge selected. But, before the poet fell asleep, he discovered in his reading enough wonders to inspire a poetical vision which took the form of a marvelous...