author

Richard Ferris

A little-known Elizabethan adventurer and royal messenger, he is remembered for turning a daring long-distance feat into one of the earliest printed first-person travel narratives in English.

1 Audiobook

How It Flies; or, The Conquest of the Air The Story of Man's Endeavors to Fly and of the Inventions by Which He Has Succeeded

How It Flies; or, The Conquest of the Air The Story of Man's Endeavors to Fly and of the Inventions by Which He Has Succeeded

by Richard Ferris

About the author

Richard Ferris was an English adventurer active in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Sources describe him as one of the ordinary messengers attached to Queen Elizabeth I's household, with records placing him in royal service by 1580 and still in that role in 1606.

He is chiefly remembered for The most dangerous and memorable adventure of Richard Ferris, a 1590 pamphlet recounting his remarkable journey from London to Bristol and back in a set time. Modern scholars have noted the work as an early example of self-narrated travel writing and public self-promotion, which gives his small surviving body of work an outsized historical interest.

Not much else about his life is securely documented, but that mix of court service, bravado, and print culture makes him an unusually vivid figure from Elizabethan England.