English historian, born in London on the 3rd of October 1818. He was placed in charge of the maps and charts in the printed-book department of the British Museum in January 1844. In 1867 the collection was raised to a department and Mr. Major appointed keeper. He was honorary secretary of the Hakluyt Society from 1849 to 1858, and vice-president of the Royal Geographical Society from 1881 to 1884. Mr. Major made valuable researches in the history and bibliography of the Columbian era of American history, and published works and edited maps and documents relating to this period. Among these are Select Letters of Christopher Columbus (1847); Early Voyages to Terra Australis (1859); and On the Discovery of Australia by the Portuguese (1861), in which the Portuguese are shown to have been the first discoverers of Australia; The Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, Surnamed the Navigator (1868), which is considered authoritative; and Voyages of the Venetian Brothers, N. and A. Zeno, to the Northern Seas in the Fourteenth Century (1873). He died in Kensington on the 25th of June 1891.
