Part 2

Next, in 1589, appeared the first volume of the magnum opus of our author, under the general title of _The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoueries of the English Nation made by Sea or over Land to the most remote and farthest distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1500 years_—an elaborate work of which the _Divers Voyages_ was the germ, having the same direct object in view. Its scheme embraced a collection, in three volumes, of narratives and records, in the original, of voyages and discoveries made by Englishmen from earliest times to the compiler’s day, sprinkled with accounts of the more important explorations for foreign nations having relation to those for England. The initial volume opened with an extended “Epistle Dedicatorie” addressed to Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s chief secretary, and a more detailed “Preface to the Favourable Reader.” It included the main part of the _Divers Voyages_.

Nine years later, in 1598, the first volume of a second edition, revised and enlarged, to include voyages made “within the compasse of these 1600 yeares,” instead of fifteen hundred, made its appearance. The second volume of this edition followed the next year, 1599, and the last in 1600. They were of large size, fools-cap folio, and contained altogether the impressive number of five hundred and seventeen separate narratives of adventures by Englishmen from the time of King Arthur to and through Elizabeth’s reign.

Extended “Epistles Dedicatorie” were also prefixed to each of these volumes. That to the first was addressed to Charles Howard, the vanquisher of the Spanish Armada, 1588. Both of those to the second and third were to Sir Robert Cecil, Walsingham’s successor in the chief secretaryship, and afterward the Earl of Salisbury.

With the completion of the third volume Hakluyt’s work of research by no means ended. It was continued untiringly till the close of his life, and sufficient material was left by him in manuscript to constitute a fourth volume. This material passed to the hands of Samuel Purchas, the author of _Purchas his Pilgrimages, or Relations of the World_, etc., 1613, who utilized it, together with matter from the _Principall Navigations_, in a work of four volumes, published in 1625, under the title of _Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes: containing a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land Travels by Englishmen and Others_. Afterward the _Purchas his Pilgrimages_ was added as a fifth volume to the set. The combined work became most popularly known as _Purchas’s Pilgrims_, and was treated by some of the early historians as the first source of American history.

Nor did Hakluyt’s publications of an important nature and with the same general object—the fostering of naval enterprise generally and of American colonization in particular—end with the issue of his magnum opus. In 1601 he brought out, under the title of _The Discoveries of the World_, an English translation of a treatise by a Portuguese, Antonio Galvano. After that came an English version of Peter Martyr under this taking title: _The Historie of the West Indies: Containing the Actes and Aduentures of the Spaniards, which have conquered and peopled those Countries, inriched with varietie of pleasant relation of the Manners, Ceremonies, Lawes, Governments, and Warres of the Indians: Published in Latin by Mr. Hakluyt and translated into English by M. Lok, Gent._ This appeared a short time before the permanent colonization was effected, and was evidently timed to stimulate that movement.

Next, in 1609, he produced a translation from the Portuguese of an account of De Soto’s discoveries in 1539–1543, with a description of Florida and its riches, designed to encourage and foster the Virginia colony. To this Hakluyt gave the English title _Virginia Richly Valued by the description of the mainland of Florida her next neighbour_. The dedication was addressed to the “Right Worshipfull Counsellors and others the cheerefull aduenturors for the aduancement of that Christian and noble plantation of Virginia,” and the booklet was commended to them as a “worke ... though small in shew yet great in substance,” yielding much light to the enterprise in which they were with him concerned, whether it was desired “to know the present and future commodities of our countrie, or the qualities and conditions of the Inhabitants, or what course is best to be taken with them.”

Two years later, in 1611, he issued a second edition, for the combined purpose of buoying up the spirits of the young colony, now disheartened by much suffering, and of procuring additional aid for it at home. This appeared with a new and more alluring title, in which particular stress was laid upon the wealth of gold, silver, and other precious things supposed to exist in the region, then believed to be the richest in the world: _The worthie and famous historie of the travails, discovery and conquest of that great continent of Terra Florida being lively paralleled with that of our own now inhabited Virginia. As also the commodities of said country with divers and excellent and rich mynes of golde, silver, and other metals etc. which cannot but give us a great and exceeding hope for our Virginia being so neere to one continent etc._

This was fittingly Hakluyt’s last published work.

II RICHARD HAKLUYT THE MAN

Beyond the bare data of his birth and antecedents the story of Richard Hakluyt’s life is gathered largely from his own writings, found for the most part in shreds of autobiography running through the several extended “Epistles Dedicatorie” introducing his published volumes. It is a winsome and an inspiriting story of a man of action behind the scenes of great performances rather than in the forefront: of a singularly modest man not forth-pressing among his contemporaries, yet ranking in great accomplishments with the best of “Queen Elizabeth’s men.”

Even the exact place and date of his birth are not stated by any of his biographers. All that appears to be definitely fixed is that he was born near London about the year 1553. That was the year that Edmund Spenser was born; one year after the birth of Sir Walter Raleigh, and one year before the birth of Sir Philip Sidney, both of whom were to become his confrères in schemes of American colonization. He was five years old when Elizabeth came to the throne. Eleven years after his birth Shakspere was born, and he died the same year that Shakspere died. Thus we have the chronology of his life, 1553–1616, his active career extending through the blossom and the bloom of the dazzling Elizabethan period.

Richard Hakluyt was of an ancient Hertfordshire family, dating back in that historic county to the thirteenth century. The family seat was at Yatton, or Eyton, not far from the old town of Leominster. They were of Welsh extraction, and our cosmographer may have indulged a personal pride in the legend of “the most ancient discovery of the West Indies,” made by a Welshman in the twelfth century, three hundred years before Columbus. Hakluyts appear to have been early preferred for public station in Hertfordshire. The name (then generally spelled Hackluit) is found in the lists of high sheriffs for the county from the reign of Edward the second to Henry the eighth. In the second year of Henry the fourth Leonard Hackluit, knight, was sheriff. Walter Hakelut was knighted in the thirty-fourth year of Edward the first. Others of the name are seen among early members of Parliament. Thomas Hakeluyt was chancellor of the diocese of Hertford in 1349, in the latter part of Edward the third’s reign. Richard Hakluyt of Yatton, afterward of London, an elder cousin of our Richard, was a cosmographer before him, and esteemed in his time “as well by some principal ministers of state as by several most noted persons among the mercantile part of the kingdom, as a great encourager of navigation and improvement of trade, art, and manufactures.”

Our Richard Hakluyt was the second of four brothers, all of whom were liberally educated. The eldest, Thomas, was trained at the Westminster School and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a celebrated physician. Richard followed Thomas at the Westminster School when he was fourteen years old, being elected one of the queen’s scholars to that “fruitfull nurserie,” as he terms it. He remained at Westminster for six years and then passed up to Christ College, Oxford. While a schoolboy the love of geography and maritime discovery was implanted in him by his cousin Richard, and so agreeably that he determined to make the pursuit of these branches of science his life-avocation. How this came about let him relate in his own quaint language, translated, for more comfortable reading, into modern English.

“I do remember that being a youth and one of her Majesty’s scholars at Westminster, that fruitful nursery, it was my hap to visit the chamber of M. Richard Hakluyt, my cousin, a Gentleman of the Middle Temple, well known unto you, at a time when I found lying open upon his board certain books of Cosmography with an universal Map. He seeing me somewhat curious in the view thereof began to instruct my ignorance by shewing me the division of the earth into three parts after the old account, and then according to the latter & better distribution, into more: he pointed with his wand to all the known Seas, Gulfs, Bays, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdoms, Dukedoms, and Territories of each part; with declaration also of their special commodities & particular wants, which by the benefit of traffic & intercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied. From the Map he brought me to the Bible, and turning to the 107 Psalm, directed me to the 23 & 24 verses, where I read, that they which go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep, &c. Which words of the Prophet together with my cousin’s discourse (things of high and rare delight to my young nature) took in me so deep an impression, that I constantly resolved, if ever I were preferred to the University, where better time and more convenient place might be ministered for their studies, would by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature, the doors of which whereof (after a sort) were so happily opened before me.”

Hakluyt entered Oxford in 1570, and took the degree of bachelor of arts in 1574 and master of arts in 1577. While diligently and faithfully pursuing the regular college course, true to his boyhood resolution he devoted all his spare time to his self imposed studies. He became so proficient in them that after taking his master’s degree he was chosen to read “public lectures” on the science of cosmography and navigation. The lectures were delivered presumably in London and with much satisfaction to his hearers, among whom we may be sure were found master mariners and common seamen, as his relation proceeds:

“When not long after I was removed to Christ-Church in Oxford, my exercise of duty first performed, I fell to my intended course, and by degrees read over whatsoever printed and written discoveries and voyages I found extant either in the Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portugal [Portuguese], French, or English languages, and in my public lectures was the first that produced and shewed both the old and imperfectly composed, and the new lately reformed Maps, Globes, Spheres, and other instruments of this Art for demonstration in the common schools, to the singular pleasure and general contentment of my auditory.”

Possibly at these lectures, certainly soon after, he was advocating with much earnestness the pressing need of popular technical education to produce informed and skilful mariners, and this he continued persistently to urge in all his after writings. He would have had established in London a lectureship, or a school of nautical crafts, from which English seamen might be graduated complete navigators. To this end he dwelt much upon the advantages of the navigators of rival nations, gained largely through their scientific training. At that time Spain was maintaining in Seville, at the “Contractation House,” or Exchange, a “Learned Reader” in the art of navigation and a board of examiners, of which the reader was a member, and no man in Spain could obtain the charge of a ship for the Indies till he had attended the reader’s course and had passed the examining board. A century earlier the “hero nation” of Portugal had established a school of navigation, instituted by that heroic figure in maritime discovery, Prince Henry, surnamed “The Navigator.” Despite, however, the force of Hakluyt’s sound arguments, and the endorsement of his proposition by such seasoned mariners as Sir Francis Drake and by various men of affairs, the lectureship never was founded, greatly to his regret.

When Hakluyt began his studies in cosmography systematically the only English work at his hand touching the subject was the _Historie of Travayle_ by Richard Eden, dating from 1555. This was the first work of its kind produced in England, and a new edition was brought out while Hakluyt was a student at Oxford. Although it was a classic from a scholarly Englishman, it presented only a limited view of maritime discovery. Consequently the young student was obliged to pursue his investigations chiefly in various foreign works, and among manuscripts deposited in private libraries or collections. He had not progressed far before he had become impressed with the backwardness of England in Western occupation since the discovery of the North American continent under her auspices in 1497 and 1498. Great deeds had been performed by intrepid English explorers to the North and Northeast, and English commerce had been advanced in the rich regions of the East; but on the Western continent no further attempt of moment toward exploration or settlement had been made by Englishmen from the finish of Henry the seventh’s reign to Elizabeth’s time. Meanwhile other nations had established foothold in these “fair and fruitful parts,” to England’s disadvantage. Thus Hakluyt came clearly to see that maritime traffic united with American colonization must be the means that England should adopt, without further delay, if she were to improve the condition of her people and become a naval power in the world.

Imbued with these convictions he early set out, perhaps while still delivering the “Public Lectures,” definitely to promote this policy with voice and pen. Early he is found in close touch with men leading in state affairs and in bold enterprises. He is much in correspondence with Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s chief secretary. He gets points from Sir Francis Drake after that great navigator’s return, in 1580, from the first circumnavigation of the globe by an Englishman, loaded with treasure, the spoil of Spanish harbours on the Pacific, and crowned with honours for the discovery of California for the English and its occupation as “New Albion.” He has intimate intercourse with Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to whom, in 1578, Elizabeth had given her letters patent to discover and to colonize “remote, heathen, and barbarous lands”—the first grant of the kind ever made by an English sovereign,—and, as we have seen, prepares his first book, _Divers Voyages_, in aid of Sir Humphrey’s project. Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half-brother and associate, who had known Hakluyt and was conversant with his studies in cosmography when he was at college, became his patron. Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicates the _Divers Voyages_, had been his fellow-student at Oxford.

Hakluyt planned to accompany Gilbert’s fatal expedition of 1583, but before its departure he was appointed chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, the queen’s ambassador to Paris. This preferment evidently came to him directly through his interest in nautical affairs. Those who obtained it for him believed that his services to the cause of Western discoveries and colonization would then be most valuable from that post of observation and influence. Walsingham expected him to make diligent enquiry of “such things as may yield any light unto our Western discoveries,” and he justified this hope by undertaking shrewdly to collect information of the movements of the Spanish and as well the French, and to recommend measures for the furtherance of the cause which he had most at heart. No sooner was he established at Paris than he became absorbed in this special mission, and it continued almost his sole occupation while he remained with the embassy, which was for a period of five years.

Upon the failure of the Gilbert enterprise and the loss of Sir Humphrey he is ardently enlisted in Raleigh’s project, furnishing in its interest, at Raleigh’s request, “discourses both in print and written hand.” These “discourses” are supposed to have been embodied in Raleigh’s memorial to the queen which brought him his patent of March, 1584, as liberal as Gilbert’s. The important document on _Mr. Rawley’s Voyage_, or _A Particular Discourse_ on Western planting, may have embodied some of the features of the memorial. Hakluyt wrote the “Discourse” in London when ostensibly on a summer vacation from his duties at Paris. At the same time he was busied in judicious “trumpeting” of the enterprise among statesmen and merchant adventurers.

He continued hand in hand with Raleigh through the latter’s repeated attempts to plant his Virginia colonies, encouragingly buoyant and hopeful in each new venture following dismal and sometimes tragic failure; and he became foremost in the company of gentlemen and merchants to whom Raleigh was compelled to assign his patent in 1588. Afterward, upon the accession of James the first, he was the chief promoter of a petition to the king for a new grant of patents for Virginia colonization that brought the royal charter of April, 1606, under which were formed the corporations subsequently known as the London and the Plymouth companies, between whom was to be equally divided the great tract of country lying between the thirty-fourth and the forty-fifth degrees of latitude and reaching to the backwoods without bound. He was made one of the patentees of the London, or South Virginia, Company, which effected the first permanent English settlement—at Jamestown, in 1606.

His great work of _The Principal Navigations_ was in preparation while Raleigh’s projects were under way. Its scheme was drawn at the outset with remarkable breadth and on a lofty scale. While in Stafford’s service at Paris he tells us, “I both heard in speech and read in books, other nations miraculously extolled for their discoveries and notable enterprises by sea, but the English of all others, for their sluggish security, and continual neglect of the like attempts ... either ignominiously reported or exceedingly condemned [? condensed].... Thus both hearing and reading the obliquy of our nation, and finding few or none of our own men able to reply herein; and further, not seeing any man to have care to recommend to the world the industrious labours and painful travels of our countrymen; for stopping the mouths of reproachers, myself ... determined, notwithstanding all difficulties, to undertake the burden of that work wherein all others pretended either ignorance or lack of leisure, or want of sufficient argument, whereas (to speak truly) the huge toil and the small profit to ensue, were the chief causes of the refusal.”

In the laborious collection of his material, much “dispersed, scattered, and hidden in several hucksters’ hands,” as he says, he sought the assistance of the foremost scholars, bibliographers, and writers, and cultivated the acquaintance of all classes of men who could give him information. He tells of talking with Don Antonio, the Portuguese Pretender, when in Paris, and with several of Antonio’s “best captains and pilots, one of whom was born in the East Indies.” He became friendly with travelled French sailors. One of them gave him a piece of supposed silver ore, and showed him “beasts’ skins draped and painted by Indians.” Another exhibited “a piece of the tree called Sassafras brought from Florida, and expounded its high medical virtues,” which afterward was much sought by voyagers to America. He browsed in the king’s library at Paris. He established friendly relations with foreign cosmographers and exchanged letters with them and with other foreign scholars. In London he found and copied rare manuscripts in Lord Lumley’s “stately library”; had access to the queen’s privy gallery at Westminster; and to a rich cabinet of curiosities brought home by travellers. He sought English sea-captains upon their return to port and had informing interviews with them about their adventures. Some brought him tales from Spain about the natives of Florida. Once he travelled two hundred miles on horseback to interview one Thomas Butts, then the only survivor of a disastrous English voyage to Newfoundland in 1536.

The initial volume was completed after his final return to England at the end of his term with the French embassy. Its publication was a distinct event in English letters. The lofty motives that impelled him to the production of the enlarged edition in three volumes he details in his picturesquely phrased “Epistle Dedicatorie” to Lord Charles Howard, prefixed to volume one.

“Right Honourable and my very good Lord,” he here writes, “after I had long since published in Print many Navigations and Discoveries of Strangers in divers languages, as well here at London as in the city of Paris during my five years abode in France with the worthy knight, Sir Edward Stafford, your brother-in-law, his Majesty’s most prudent and careful ambassador ligier with the French king; and had waded on still further and further in the sweet study of the history of Cosmography, I began at length to conceive that with diligent observation, something might be gathered which might commend our nation for their high courage and singular activity in the search and discovery of the most unknown quarters of the world.... The ardent love of my country devoured all difficulties, and, as it were, with a sharp goad provoked me and thrust me forward into this troublesome and painful action. And after great charges and infinite cares, after many watchings, toils, and travels, and wearying out of my weak body, at length I have collected three several volumes of the English Navigations, Traffics, and Discoveries to strange, remote, and far distant countries. Which work of mine I have not included with the compass of things duly done in these later days, as though little or nothing worthy of memory had been performed in former ages, but mounting aloft by the space of many hundred years, have brought to light many very rare and worthy monuments which long have lain miserably scattered in musty corners and wretchedly hidden in misty darkness, and were very like for the greatest part to have been buried in perpetual oblivion.”

In his Preface to the same volume, addressed to the “Friendly Reader,” he further emphasizes this point with the quaintly fashioned statement that in bringing these “antiquities smothered and buried in dark silence” to light, he has incorporated “into one body the torn and scattered limbs of our ancient and late navigations by sea, our voyages by land, and traffic of merchandise by both,” and restored “each

## particular member being before displaced, to their true joints and