This is a single element of my coursework. 1500 words for a biography on William Hawkins life, but only using one primary source which is: Purchas, Samuel (1625) Hakluytus Posthumus; or Purchas His Pilgrimes (London) Volume III Chapter 7 ‘Captaine William Hawkins, his Relations of the occurrents which happened in the time of his residence in India, in the Company of the Great Mogull.’ This biography must be informed by the first element of my coursework (attached) which is a contextualised essay, providing the themes for the biography section.
Advice from prof: You need to use evidence from the primary source material to provide an account of the individual’s life (or at least those parts of it that the source material discusses and you see as relevant). This will certainly mean being selective (not all of the document will be relevant to what you want to do) and also working within the limitations and particular perspective of that source material whether it is written by or about the person in question. Within this biographical section, you can be more inventive in how you recount that life if you choose to be (as long as your account is supported by the source). There is certainly an element of story-telling to this. Again, Global Lives (Miles Ogborn) provides some guide to what you might do through the biographies presented there. [For very interesting examples of the relationship between history and fiction in providing such accounts see Kate Grenville’s (2005) novel The Secret River about the encounters between white settlers and Australian aborigines and her account (in Searching for the Secret River (2007) of how she negotiated her way between history and fiction in writing it. Or see her later novel The Lieutenant (2008) which deals with similar subject matter and the account in David Turnbull (2009) ‘Boundary-crossings, cultural encounters and knowledge spaces in early Australia,’ in S. Schaffer, L. Roberts, K. Raj and J. Delbourgo (eds) The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (Science History Publications, Sagamore Beach) pp. 387-428 of the astronomer William Dawes on whom it is based.]