Voyages and Discoveries

INTRODUCTION

1

The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation is a collection of documents made in the sixteenth century, extending to a million and a half words. By rigorous excision and abridgement, about a tenth of Hakluyt’s matter has been compressed into this Penguin edition, and put into chronological order. The many volumes of the complete Hakluyt, usually unopened, were often enough to be found on private bookshelves years ago when England thought of herself as imperial. Since those days Hakluyt has been used mainly as a source of rattling good yarns. He is very much more; and this selection has been made to whet the appetite of anyone who ever wanted to try the serious pleasure of bookworming through the entire collection.

To the title of his second and enlarged edition, 1598–1600, Hakluyt added the one significant word, Traffiques. The English nation in the previous fifty years had travelled and discovered, not for fun, but in order to do business. Nearly all these documents – ships’ logs, salesmen’s reports to head office, secret economic intelligence, captured enemy papers – relate, in the last analysis, to trade. Hakluyt does his best to prove that the English were travellers even before the Crusades; perhaps because any tradition is a comfort, even a fake one. But England had, in fact, arrived laggardly on the world’s commercial scene.

In the previous century the carrying trade around the European littoral had largely been in Venetian or German hands. England was a kingdom on the margin of affairs: a purveyor of raw materials, still selling abroad some raw wool that might have been woven for the market. But soon afterwards the Portuguese, another small people on Europe’s outer edge, found a vastly profitable detour to the Spice Islands around the Cape of Good Hope: on the cargo he brought back to Lisbon, Vasco da Gama is said to have made a profit of 10,000 per cent. The discovery of America decisively shifted the centre of gravity in world trade. And there was England, an island with a conveniently indented coastline, already launched forth expectantly into the Atlantic to confront the New World. The opportunity was immense.

By the 1550s the extravagant output of bullion from Potosí and other American mines was beginning to agitate European trade. Already the Tudor dynasty had endowed England with a new dominant class: men who had risen by the law and mopped up their share of church lands, men to whom enterprise and profitability were congenial ideas. England began to challenge the Portuguese and Spanish monopoly of sea-routes to the Indies, East and West. The French were some little way ahead, the Dutch would soon be coming up on their heels, when belatedly but with their usual obstinacy, shrewdness and courage, English seamen began to try out one way after another of getting at the gold and the spices. Many of the ways they chose were next to impossible.

Since the Portuguese-dominated route round the Cape and thence to India and Cathay could not be forced, they were obliged to try heroic outflanking manoeuvres through the ice-bound seas north of Canada and Siberia - routes that have become viable only in our lifetimes. For these Tudor seamen the Northeast and Northwest Passages were never more than hope’s graveyard.

The Venetian hold over trade to the Levant was successfully if wearisomely bypassed when an Arctic route was found into Russia - northward around Scandinavia and thence into the White Sea. Since Tsar Ivan by conquering Kazan and Astrakhan 1552–6 had forced a way south to the Caspian Sea, goods could be worked up the Dvina and down the Volga, across the Caspian and actually into Persia; there to be traded or bartered for Oriental goods coming overland - though at a diminishing rate of profit as distance and risk and political friction increased.

Others like John Hawkins tried running the Spanish blockade, and trading directly with America - where African slaves to work the plantations were discovered to be a prime article of commerce. Others again, before and during the long drawn out naval war with Spain, experimented with more or less glossed over piracy: the readiest means of diverting commercial profits from one pocket to another, without the usual need first to strike a bargain.

The years from 1575 to 1620, observed J. M. Keynes, were the ‘palmy days of profit’.* Poor people in town and country might suffer from the headlong rise in prices which followed the dissemination through Europe of Spanish silver, but price inflation is good for business. For merchants trading abroad this was a time of exhilarating opportunity and they grabbed at it with both hands.

Organized mercantile exploration may be said to have begun in earnest in 1553, with Sebastian Cabot’s instructions to Sir Hugh Willoughby, whose expedition, though intended for Cathay, pioneered the northward route to Russia. This veteran explorer of North America, tempted back to England after long years in the service of Spanish navigation, is here setting down from experience a series of practical rules for those who sail under discipline into strange seas. Any reader who happens to have served on the lower deck of the Royal Navy will recognize at once the distinctive tone of voice. Cabot’s set of imperatives for shipboard life, derived from Spanish experience, were to serve the English well for the next four centuries.

2

Hakluyt meant his documents to be useful. He accumulated for instance a mass of navigational fact and economic information -of which only small samples are here given. Important pieces of knowledge, formerly held as trade secrets, had been yielded up at Hakluyt’s urging by merchants and mariners, and put on display for the common good. But Hakluyt’s intention as archivist and editor was also consciously historical. He deliberately arranged his documents to throw light on recent national experience. Devoid of vanity and pedantry, he conceals this historical intention behind arrays of plain fact; but the real function of the book is to promote national confidence. By displaying the facts intelligibly he hopes to give policy, whether private or national, a better sense of direction. Later, as more specialist works took the place of this first agglomeration, its practical usefulness to merchants and mariners may have been exhausted. But in-history and literature, in geography, and even in the natural and social sciences, Hakluyt’s remoter implications reverberate underground to this day. As Bacon observed in the Advancement of Learning, ‘This proficience in navigation and discoveries may plant also an expectation of the further proficience and augmentation of all sciences.’

Hakluyt is our first serious geographer – the Englishman who decisively parts company with medieval cosmography, weighed down as it was by the authority of classical texts, and the astronomy of Ptolemy. Hakluyt’s informants are practical, hard-headed and fearless men, who root their lives in the written certainties of logbook and ledger and Book of Common Prayer. His rough-and-ready shipmasters can have had no inbuilt prejudice against a Copernican world. They knew that circumnavigation was possible. Sun and stars overhead are not symbols of perfection, but useful signals of whereabouts; the stars control a navigator’s fate by telling him his latitude. Hakluyt himself is a scholar who has learned to get on terms with such men as these. He is the human link in Elizabethan London between ship’s captain, merchant, map-maker, courtier, statesman, speculator and foreign geographer.

Because the method of Hakluyt’s collection, informed by the mood of the new learning, is accurate, generous, sensible, free of dogma and based upon living practice, information he was the first to organize underpins a number of our contemporary academic disciplines. His lists of words in rum native lingos may have been provided chiefly so that a ship’s captain could make himself understood when he came to a strange place – but here, or hereabouts, is the germ of comparative linguistics. Shipmen breaking in upon more primitive, hitherto untouched societies for the purposes of trade had a faculty of observing and recording curious customs with the lack of prejudice which distinguishes the anthropologist, who is their historical legatee. A diplomat might get a better grip on his profession from reading Hakluyt’s book; a cloth merchant could plan his export drive. There is also much descriptive botany and natural history and a quantity and variety of significant economic information that in an abridgement can only be suggested. All sciences begin with collections – and in this early, multiplex collection the cast of mind is proto-scientific.

Probably the last thing Hakluyt intended was to make an anthology of recent English prose. But as the dates appended to his documents jog on from the fifties to the eighties and his informants grow more aware of the size and strangeness of their world, there is a perceptible enrichment of language. Cadence and vocabulary begin to reflect the intoxicating taste of success in complex endeavour. The English language is, visibly, becoming equivalent to Shakespeare’s mind.

Earlier merchants’ letters, repetitive, eccentrically punctuated, languid with law terms, grip one’s attention only when some novelty is described in words which happen to glow from personal experience. Compare specimens of the earliest prose – index of a society incompletely broken out from the static values of feudalism – with the authentic eloquence that arrives within one generation. Raleigh’s account of the Revenge’s last fight off the Azores is a deliberate work of art – at moments so vivid that one feels almost physically the throb in the writer’s throat as he meditates the action. What officer of the Crown writes like this nowadays?

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By origin the Hakluyts were border gentry from Herefordshire. In the 1540s the antiquary John Leland, making notes for his Itinerary, was entertained by them at Eaton Manor near Leominster, and wrote, ‘The Hackluits have been gentlemen in times out of memory.’ Sir Walter Hakelutel, the family’s first notability, had been Justice of West Wales in the time of Edward I, and died in 1315. By Tudor times the name was written Hakluyt and evidence indicates that it was pronounced Haklet.

Younger sons had as usual gone into law, trade and the church. Take for example Hakluyt’s cousin and namesake–a lawyer, whose name too has a place in the history of travel and trade – Richard Hakluyt of the Middle Temple, an older man than Richard the preacher and geographer. His father, also a lawyer, was for a long time Clerk to the Council for Wales; an uncle had been admitted apprentice to the Skinners’ Company in 1510; another uncle took an Oxford degree in Canon Law, and held a Suffolk living: thoroughly typical Tudor gentry. Richard the geographer was the protégé of Richard of the Middle Temple, and may well have been his ward.

‘I do remember that being a youth,’ wrote Hakluyt in the dedication to Sir Francis Walsingham of his first edition, ‘… it was my hap to visit the chamber of Mr 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… began to instruct my ignorance… he pointed with his wand to all the known Seas, Gulfs, Bays… Kingdoms, Dukedoms and territories of each part, with declaration also of their special commodities, and particular wants, which by the benefit of traffic, and intercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied… my cousin’s discourse… took in me so deep an impression, that I constantly resolved… I would by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature…’

Sir Francis Walsingham, the Secretary of State responsible for Queen Elizabeth’s foreign policy, was also the organizer of her elaborate secret service. Hakluyt’s cousin, the lawyer who kept maps in his chambers, a man familiar in the City of London as a projector of new discoveries, was perhaps ‘well known unto’ Walsingham as a source of intelligence. In February 1570–71, for example, when there was a threat of Ireland’s being invaded, we find him giving confidential information to Burghley about a Spanish mobilization order, acquired by his informant, he cheerfully admits, by ‘harkening and listening at a lock hole’. More usually he seems to have been an occasional adviser to London merchants on matters of economic geography. In 1578 he was involved in Gilbert’s first attempt to plant a colony in America; and in 1580 advised the Russia Company on its Northeast Passage attempt. He must evidently have made accessible to the younger and now more famous Richard Hakluyt many of the documents relating voyages to Russia and the Levant; not only did he direct his young cousin’s early enthusiasm, he would have been able also to effect the right introductions. Hakluyt’s book is so comprehensive because this elder cousin of his broke the ground.

Our Richard Hakluyt was born in 1551 or 1552, and would have been about sixteen when he was shown those fascinating maps in his cousin’s chambers. In the late sixties he was elected from Westminster School, where he had been Queen’s Scholar, to Christ Church, Oxford. He was a contemporary there of Sir Philip Sidney, later to become Walsingham’s son-in-law. Between 1577 when he proceeded M.A., and 1583 when Student of Christ Church, Hakluyt took Holy Orders.

Interest in geographical studies in the University was by no means dead, though it still kept a medieval cast of mind and was tied to classical texts. The picture of our universe that most educated men held by was Ptolemaic – sun and planets making complicated gear-wheel revolutions round an Earth at the centre of everything. Even among learned men, academic knowledge of a world now known, practically, to include whole new continents would probably not extend beyond information conveyed from antiquity by geographers like Pliny, Strabo and Ptolemy, and by subsequent more or less fanciful travellers’ tales. Hakluyt, in his first edition, reprints the Latin text of Mandeville, whose delightful though often far-fetched medieval collection of travels was still thought of as geographically informative, if not authoritative. Martin Frobisher, in his ship’s library, actually took a copy of Mandeville with him as a geographical guide, on his first attempt to find the Northwest Passage.

Just before Hakluyt’s time at Oxford, the continental map-makers Mercator and Ortelius had begun to arouse intellectual interest by presenting an augmented picture of our world in the light of the new discoveries. Hakluyt gave geographical lectures on the use of these new maps and globes, but much of his time must have been spent learning languages: a decisive study in his chosen career. The Spaniards were beginning to publish descriptions of the lands they had discovered; so were the French. In 1580 Hakluyt is found writing to Mercator for information about Siberian coasts and currents which might be of use to an English expedition setting out once more to find a Northeast Passage. He spoke with Sir Francis Drake about a plan for subsidizing a chair of navigation. The Portuguese ambassador in London, his country now swallowed up by Spain, might be of mind to purvey information: Hakluyt had with him ‘a great conference in matters of cosmography’. He speaks of having mastered Greek, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French, but evidently his Spanish was weakest, for later on he prefers the French or Italian translation of a Spanish original, whenever he can lay his hands on one.

In 1582 Hakluyt published his Divers Voyages touching the discovery of America, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. To furnish timely argument for Walsingham’s policy of planting an English colony on the American mainland, Hakluyt had brought together, from written records, an account of much it might be well to know about America. From this response to a need of practical politics, his documentary method was beginning to emerge.

As early in the century as 1527 Robert Thorne in Seville, alive to the implications for England of Spanish discoveries, had written encouragingly, ‘There is no land unhabitable, nor sea innavigable.’ The voyages of Cabot and Frobisher, as set down by Hakluyt, gave point to this saying. He baits the argument for the City of London with a somewhat overstated list of American products available for trade, and gives again the arguments for a Northwest Passage to Cathay – that recurring dream of making an immensely profitable detour by going to the Indies northward around Canada.

In his later Particular Discourse on the Western Planting – presented to Queen Elizabeth in Walter Raleigh’s name, a state paper not printed in the Principal Navigations – Hakluyt was at liberty to give more thoroughly the argument for colonial expansion. Strategic reasons were given emphasis. Spain, the dominant European power – financing the Counter-Reformation with Ameri can gold, trying by force to impose Catholicism on France and the Low Countries – is identified as the enemy of an England already hoping to prosper by the inroads that may be made upon the Spanish colonial monopoly. An English colony midway along the North American coast could serve as a naval base for attacks on the West Indies and the Spanish Main, not to mention on the Plate Fleet – Spain’s annual convoy bringing gold and silver in bulk across the Atlantic to Seville.

Hakluyt’s report on the state of the Spanish possessions, procured, he says, from an ‘excellent French captain’, describes them as under-manned and surrounded by Indians made hostile by maltreatment. A plantation, in Hakluyt’s view, must also be a mission, where religion is employed to win the natives over. (He made several attempts to go to America as a chaplain; once he spoke of following Gilbert to Newfoundland; later he sought leave of absence from a post in Paris to go on the 1584 voyage to Virginia. The chance finally came in middle age, when his enthusiasm had waned.)

He goes on, in his Particular Discourse, to suggest how America could ultimately make England economically independent of Europe. America produced all those sought-after articles of commerce for which the English had been obliged to pay highly elsewhere – Hakluyt gives a list of fifty-four, all of which came to light eventually in the course of trade. He quotes with satisfaction the case of a Rouen merchant who sold in France for 440 crowns a parcel of furs he had bought in Maine for forty. The real source of wealth in the New World, Hakluyt insists, will be not those imaginary gold mines that had blinded Gilbert’s and Frobisher’s backers, but the fur trade, not to mention the timber and naval stores and potash that might make England independent of the Baltic. Hakluyt for the moment drops the modest mask of archivist to show uncommon powers of historical insight into the problems, then entirely novel, of colonization.

Hakluyt about this time was sent to Bristol, the second port of the Kingdom, on a mission as Walsingham’s agent and was successful in gaining the support of the Corporation there for Gilbert’s Newfoundland colony. Hakluyt was rewarded for these recent services by preferment in the chapter of Bristol Cathedral.

4

As interlopers into the Spanish American Empire, the French were the pace-makers. They had been established on the banks of the St Lawrence River since Cartier’s discoveries in the 1530s, and had planted short-lived colonies in Florida as early as the 1560s. For the time being Queen Elizabeth had no envoy in Spain itself; so Paris, then a focus of anti-Spanish sentiment, was the next-best listening-post to unattainable Madrid. In the autumn of 1583 the thirty-one year old Oxford scholar Richard Hakluyt made his way there as chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, the new English ambassador.

Hakluyt described his prime duty in Paris as ‘diligent inquiry of such things as may yield any light unto our western discovery.’ This was a time when exact geographical knowledge of America was politically vital. As late as 1583 there had been no certain knowledge in England of the coast of Newfoundland, despite the long experience offshore of our deep-sea fishermen, not to mention John Cabot’s landfall made there, or thereabouts, three generations earlier. In 1585 the first colonizing expedition to Virginia had sailed ill-prepared, to be brought back in distress by Drake in ’86. French knowledge of America was wider and better. The fur trade had already taken the French down the New England coast, perhaps as far as the Hudson River. Moreover Spanish ships from America sometimes called at French ports. Paris, therefore, was as close as Walsingham could reasonably get to the organized secrets of Spanish navigation, and the threatening, covert motions of Spanish policy.

Incidental intelligence that Hakluyt gained in the course of his geographical researches would never come amiss. ‘I have talked twice with Don Antonio of Portugal, and with five or six of his best captains’, Hakluyt reported. He procured a survey of the West Indies, and a plan of how the Portuguese colonies were organized. Disappointed in his hope of accompanying the Virginia colonists to Roanoke, Hakluyt found himself sent instead on a dull but useful tour of nothern French ports to get comparative figures about the profitability of French fishery and trade across the Atlantic. He also served as a courier. Said the ambassador, ‘I have taken his oath upon a book for secrecy; for his honesty I will answer.’

But Hakluyt was only a part-time spy. He was primarily a scholar in the magnificent Renaissance tradition – a man for whom the gratuitous pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was life’s most important end. In 1587 he spent half a year’s income from his Bristol sinecure on financing the Paris publication, in Latin, the cosmopolitan language of learning, of the complete Decades of Peter Martyr – a collection in seven volumes of New World discoveries, not available in full for nearly sixty years. ‘It will cost me’, wrote Hakluyt to Raleigh, ‘40 French crowns and five months travail.’

In 1588, Armada year, when his own Principal Navigations was well advanced, Hakluyt was employed carrying confidential despatches from his ambassador to Lord Burleigh. The first edition in quarto of his life-work came out in 1589–90, after the Spanish invasion fleet had miraculously been dispersed, and the English, though still in an exalted mood, could breathe more freely. Printing his work, about half as long as the later three-volume edition, may have cost the author as much as fifty Elizabethan pounds. Hakluyt has by now settled on his method – the surprisingly modern one of giving validity to history by assembling chosen documents. He has accepted the roles of archivist and editor, but does both superlatively.

Hakluyt prefers, when he can get them, eye-witness accounts and authentic business correspondence. (Perhaps the mental attitudes of social scientist and professional spy are not so very far apart.) He will go to great lengths to get at the facts: to take down an account of the 1536 Newfoundland expedition from the last survivor, Hakluyt had been willing to journey 200 miles. He had over the years won the confidence of those institutions holding stores of valuable documents – from chartered companies of merchant venturers to the Privy Council itself. From sources he was no doubt helped to by his cousin, he gives a continuous account of the Russian voyages since 1553. He documents the progress made by the Turkey Company since 1579, but omits ventures for instance to the African coast which broke in upon the Portuguese monopoly and might perhaps spoil the good terms he had established with Dom Antonio. He tends to avoid foreign accounts; the patriotic note is struck.

This quarto edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations emerged into the afterglow of Armada year. At once it took place amid that cluster of works – Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Holinshed’s History, Camden’s Britannia, Stow’s Antiquities, which together helped to give nascent English patriotism a tone of voice, indeed a life-style, it was not to discard until very recent times. Once the Protestant Englishman had been accorded his distinctive profile, the conquest of Empire had from then on a subtle moral sanction. The world was to be mastered for its own good. This new type -imperialist as godfearing knight-errant - had already been marvellously delineated throughout hundreds of Spenserian stanzas, written down, many of them, in a lonely castle amid bog and forest, surrounded by the fierce papist denizens of a temporarily conquered Ireland. To Hakluyt just then, imperialism must have seemed a worthy national destiny.

Tennyson, three centuries later, was to put that report of Sir Richard Grenville’s wrong-headed, but sublimely heroic, single-ship engagement off the Azores directly into rousing and memorable verse. Of the many hundreds of young English subalterns who fell in the hopeless trench-warfare offensives on the Somme, one may safely assume that most would have been made to learn lines of that poem by heart.

The counterpart of Spenser’s knight-errant was the gallant English sea-dog – another representative national hero; even though, like John Hawkins, he may have condemned the world that came after him to the horrid and interminable consequences of the slave trade. Respected, pillaged, but seldom read critically - ‘the prose epic of our modern English nation’, as one enthusiastic Victorian imperialist described his Principal Navigation – Richard Hakluyt’s value, not merely as a geographer but as an originator across a broad spectrum of social sciences, has too long been obscured by the glowing patriotic penumbra diffused about his work since the Armada.

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Before 1590 Hakluyt gave up the Christ Church Studentship he had kept while in Paris, together with his chaplaincy, and in that year became rector of Wetheringsett in Suffolk, a parish with two hundred communicants – a spy and a scholar thriftily rewarded, in Tudor fashion, with a cure of souls. Presumably this was when he married. For the next ten years of his life Richard Hakluyt acted as an unofficial but acknowledged geographical consultant, sometimes working for fees.

Concurrent with their own long, national fight against Spain, the Dutch were henceforth to make the running in world trade. By 1595 Dutch ships were sailing round the Cape to India and pressing onward to trade in Malaysia; by 1601 the Dutch East Indiamen comprised sixty-five ships, in fifteen squadrons. In 1599, under the provocative stimulus of this growing competition, an East India Company was organized in London, the Privy Council was petitioned, and £30,000 subscribed. Hakluyt, for the part he played in these negotiations, received a fee of ten pounds ‘and thirty shillings for three maps by him provided’. As early as 1594 merchants in Zeeland were planning an attempt of their own on the Northeast Passage by sailing northward round the island of Novaya Zemlya, and they approached Hakluyt for his professional advice.

‘Touching the reward of my labour,’ he replied, ‘I believe I shall well deserve twenty pounds sterling. But it may so happen that my advices will give your friends such light and courage that it shall profit them many thousand pounds…’ At this point Hakluyt faltered. More scholar than businessman, he went on to cut his own price by a third. ‘I will not communicate all my secrets in that matter of so great import,’ he added, ‘under the sum of twenty marks at the least.’ From the hard-headed Dutch twenty marks was what he got. ‘It seems to me well worth it’, remarked the go-between.

Barents, the Dutch explorer, also failed to find the hoped-for passage northward through the ice to Cathay. A century ago, among the objects preserved when his abandoned camp was unexpectedly discovered on Novaya Zemlya, were a manuscript version in Dutch of the English voyage of 1580 and two maps, perhaps those supplied by Hakluyt for his fee.

Sir Walter Raleigh, having expended £40,000 on his unsuccessful Virginia plantations, began to advocate the colonization of Guiana, casting the somewhat out-dated lure (for which a certain, mystifying justification could be found in Spanish histories) of Eldorado: a treasure in gold comparable with those looted by the conquistadores from Mexico and Peru. Raleigh, in his account given here of Guiana exploration, can be detected using his literary faculty to put the best complexion on the evidence. Hakluyt’s expert opinion in the matter was sought by Sir Robert Cecil, the statesman obliged to appraise the Guiana project. For, later, trying to re-live in Guiana his country’s earlier, more robust and more romantic history, Raleigh – the most intellectual of Hakluyt’s patrons – was to end his career on the block.

The world was changing. Commerce with Russia, as well as becoming more competitive, had declined. Spain dominated the entrance to the Mediterranean, inhibiting the Levant trade, and giving point to James Lancaster’s voyage in 1591. He had gone east by the Cape route, to return in 1594 with an impressively profitable cargo, and proof that the easiest way to India was wide open. Cavendish, possibly related to Hakluyt by marriage, had followed Drake’s example in one circumnavigation of the globe and failed in a second; but apart from Arctic exploration the spectacular voyages were over until the days of Captain Cook. Inexorably the world was to become one market, disintegrating and laying waste local and particular cultures. In the centuries ahead European powers would virtually divide up the world: the plunder from an eighteenth century conquest of Bengal was to finance an Industrial Revolution. Even when at last the pendulum swung the other way, those countries menaced or subordinated by European commerce would be able to retrieve their independence only by some kind of deliberate imitation of Europe. Hereabouts then the modern world begins.

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During the decades of maritime war, declared or undeclared, between England and Spain, the more spectacular profits had come from what the Spaniards spoke of as piracy – run as a speculative business, financed by syndicates. An English fleet would linger off the Azores waiting hopefully for a carrack or plate ship; or cross the Atlantic to raid some unfortunate town on the Spanish Main. Though some privateering ventures failed dismally, Drake’s famous voyage had paid its backers a dividend of 4,700 per cent. All this captured treasure went eventually to prime the pump of trade. J. M. Keynes describes how ‘those countries which had established trading relations with the Levant and with Asia were then able to export the treasure thus received on terms which were quite immensely profitable.’*

Keynes goes on to make a fascinating and significant calculation: ‘the booty brought back by Drake in the Golden Hind may fairly be considered the fountain and origin of British Foreign Investment. Elizabeth paid off out of the proceeds the whole of her foreign debt, and invested a part of the balance (about £42,000) in the Levant Company. Largely out of the profits of the Levant Company, there was formed the East India Company, the profits of which, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were the main foundation of England’s foreign connections, and so on… the £42,000 invested by Elizabeth out of Drake’s booty in 1580 would have accumulated by 1930 to approximately the actual aggregate of our present foreign investments, namely, £4,200,000,000 – or say 100,000 times greater than the original investment.’ Piracy and sober, patriotic compound interest here work hand in hand.

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In the second and greatly enlarged edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations – from which our selections are taken – the emphasis has shifted from America to the entire world. Published in three successive volumes, 1598–1600, Hakluyt’s master-work reflects the emerging situation: England, a naval power, will seek trade and colonies everywhere. English achievement in trade and travel is now self-evident; consequently Hakluyt uses non-English narratives more freely: they account for a quarter of the book. He has gone to Camden for yet more medieval records of travel – as if to give these recently enriched merchant venturers a decent genealogy. From the new edition, Mandeville has been dropped altogether. Of 350,000 words of translation from foreign tongues in the three folio volumes, a quarter of a million have been translated by Hakluyt himself. Nor is there any need now to go abroad for a decent map: the one included is taken from the terrestrial globe made in 1592 by Emeric Molineux of Lambeth for a merchant called Sanderson who had backed Davis in his Northwest Passage attempts. This is Shakespeare’s ‘new map, with the augmentation of the Indies’, immortalized in Twelfth Night (Act III, Sc. 2).*

Hakluyt had lost his wife in 1597. In 1602 he was installed prebendary in Westminster Abbey. In 1604, when he married again, he was Archdeacon of Westminster and (by Sir Robert Cecil’s patronage) chaplain at the Savoy. In 1612 he was presented to the living of Gedney in Lincolnshire. Hakluyt had prospered with the rest of them: a pluralist parson, rewarded somewhat incongruously out of Church property for services that had benefited not religion, but business and the State.

In 1616 Hakluyt died, after friendly attempts had been made by the men he had served to bestow on him a distinctive kind of immortality. In 1608 Henry Hudson in Hopewell, some of whose navigational information had been provided by Hakluyt, gave to a promontory on an island north of Spitzbergen the name Hakluyt’s Headland. The name has not survived: the island, now called Amsterdam Island, is in about 80°N. – the last bit of Europe seen by the polar explorer who follows the Gulf Stream Drift to the northernmost limit of open water. In 1616 Baffin broke through the west Greenland ice north of 70°N. and, finding an island in 77°30’N., named it Hakluyt’s Island. Headland and Island indicated as if symbolically the northern limits of English Arctic enterprise from Hakluyt’s lifetime until the nineteenth century.

Richard Hakluyt’s last years had been spent in gathering additional materials for yet another edition. He was buried on 26 November 1616 in an unmarked grave in Westminster Abbey, leaving a son reputed to have run through his estate. Hakluyt’s manuscript collection came into the hands of the Reverend Samuel Purchas (pronounced, apparently, Purkas), chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Purchas, with the stay-at-home reader in mind, began to cut away at Hakluyt’s conservatively edited documents. Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations had established a taste for closet travel: his literary legacy provided two-fifths of the 1625 edition of Purchas His Pilgrims, a vast and popular compilation extending to four million words. The documents curtailed by Purchas may make more lively reading, but they are prone also to mislead. By suppressing, for example, Baffin’s log of his important 1616 voyage to Baffin Bay and Smith Sound, Purchas contrived to distort the history of navigation. Travel and exploration were being turned at his busy hands into national myth. Purchas was awarded £100 from the East India Company, and in the two centuries that followed, being readable and romantic, his book was more highly regarded than Hakluyt’s work of sober scholarship. Purchas began a different tradition: one that ultimately flowered splendidly with Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.

8

John Donne sailed in the expedition to the Azores of 1597 as a volunteer: through a few lines of his Satyre III flickers the mood of those Englishmen who went out in small wooden ships to discover an unexplored world:

dar’st thou lay

Thee in ships woodden Sepulchers, a prey

To leaders rage, to stormes, to shot, to dearth?

Dar’st thou dive seas, and dungeons of the earth?

Hast thou couragious fire to thaw the ice

Of frozen North discoveries?

The syndicates of merchants gratefully accepted their profits; the gallant sea-dogs and the gentlemen adventurers were endowed by Hakluyt and Purchas with enduring celebrity. But the usually nameless seamen in their wooden sepulchres died by the dozen -of scurvy and calenture, washed overboard, blown up, cut down. They were often enough the unconscious victims of Tudor prosperity – displaced from their traditional lives by price inflation and enclosure. They were the first of many generations of longsuffering English countrymen to break from the cage of humiliating poverty by taking the Queen’s shilling or going for a sailor. Their manly endurance and their good nature are perhaps best of all conveyed in the tale told by those of Hawkins’s men set ashore in Central America, who fell later into the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, until at last the most obstinate among them won a way home.

Hakluyt’s collection also affords several glimpses of the social connections that from its very genesis have linked modern science with the practical needs and discoveries of expanding trade. Problems of magnetism are matters of deadly earnest to men who will need to sail their small wooden ships close to the Magnetic Pole: the Dr Gilbert who is famous as an investigator of magnetism was also interested in polar navigation. Thomas Harriot, the one-time tutor in Sir Walter Raleigh’s family, the first surveyor of Virginia, and indeed the man who took Hakluyt’s place there, is now best known for having discovered the Factor Theorem, a fundamental simplification in algebraical procedures.

Travel too is no longer an incidental aspect of pilgrimage, war or trade, but has become professional. Anthony Jenkinson – who opened up Russia and Persia for the merchant venturers, and reached Bokhara, and provided Ortelius with geographical data for his great atlas – lists the many lands through which he has journeyed with a deliberate, resonant pride.

The extent to which Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations entered the popular mind can also be noticed in literature.

‘Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger’ remarks the witch in Act I of Macbeth; and turning Hakluyt’s page we read, with a secret shock, of a ship called Tiger, her destination Aleppo. Hard-headed Ben Jonson (a pupil of Camden) turns it another way in Act V, Scene 2 of Volpone:

SECOND MERCHANT: If you could ship him away, ’twere excellent.

THIRD MERCHANT: To Zant, or to Aleppo?

PEREGRINE: Yes, and have his

Adventures put i’ the Book of Voyages,

And his gull’d story registered for truth.

Though the twin corrosives of puritanism and trade are evidently going to finish off Merry England pretty soon, and eat away also at the tissue of primitive societies abroad, Hakluyt’s great narratives are still permeated by a sense of national unity. Prosperity, empire, industrialism, the production in public schools of synthetic gentlemen, and the simultaneous pauperizing of the common people, have not yet created Disraeli’s Two Nations. The schoolmaster has not yet had time to brand the upper class on the tongue; the lower orders have not so far been struck dumb. Seaman and gentleman and poet use a virtually identical language: it would be hard at times to say which has the most admirable powers of expression. Gentleman and foremast hand are in the same wooden sepulchre and take the same risks. The original identity of interest linking trade and science, literature and knowledge – the need for national survival – is still vividly apparent, though it will not last long. Culture is soon to split between religion and science, reason and faith, poetry and prose, as English society begins its open and covert civil war of opposing classes, inexorably confronting each other down the centuries.

9

To sailors of the time, the Principal Navigations were simply their own account of themselves. Hakluyt’s documents, in Ben Jonson’s words, were ‘registered for truth’. They were reliable. They would help a wayfarer in distress. The East India fleet on its third voyage was in trouble off Sierra Leone in 1607. The master sent for ‘the Book’, and by using the facts about the coast that Hakluyt provided he brought the fleet to a safe anchorage, saving the Company £20,000. Admiralty charts and Admiralty Pilots may have systematized what Hakluyt clumsily began, and seamen everywhere have learned to rely on them. But someone, in a truthful and methodical if elementary way, had to begin all this: in a number of different directions others of us nowadays are simply carrying on.

10

The text of Hakluyt’s second and best edition has been reprinted twice in this century: reverently by the Hakluyt Society (Glasgow, 1903–5), and somewhat more cursorily by Everyman’s Library (London, 1908). The spelling of this edition has been modernized for Penguin, but the punctuation retained, except for the suppression of the confusing Elizabethan full point after numbers, and the insertion of a possessive apostrophe. On the very rare occasions when, for clarity, a word is here added to Hakluyt’s text, it has been put in square brackets. Much use has been made in this Introduction of facts contained in G. B. Parks’s Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (New York, 1928).

A satisfactorily annotated edition of Hakluyt would be the work of a lifetime well spent: the additional information provided for this condensed version in notes and glossary is little more than what the alert Penguin reader could have looked up for himself, were he sitting within reach of such common works of reference as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Dictionary of National Biography, the Oxford Dictionary, The Times Atlas, Shepherd’s Historical Atlas, and good French and Spanish dictionaries.

DEDICATIONS

The Epistle Dedicatory in the first edition, 1589. To the Right Honourable Sir Francis Walsingham Knight, Principal Secretary to Her Majesty, and one of Her Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council.

Right Honourable, 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 Mr 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 a universal Map: he seeing me somewhat curious in the view thereof, began to instruct my ignorance, by showing me the division of the earth into three parts after the old account: he pointed with his wand to all the known seas, gulfs, bays, straits, capes, rivers, empires, kingdoms, dukedoms and territories of each part, with declaration also of their special commodities, and particular wants, which by the benefit of traffic, and 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 and 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 these studies, I would by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature, the doors whereof (after a sort) were so happily opened before me.

According to which my resolution, when, not long after, I was removed to Christ Church in Oxford, my exercises of duty first performed, I fell to my intended course, and by degrees read over whatsoever printed or written discoveries and voyages I found extant either in the Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portugal, French or English languages, and in my public lectures was the first, that produced and showed both the old 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. I grew familiarly acquainted with the chiefest captains at sea, the greatest merchants, and the best mariners of our nation: by which means having gotten somewhat more than common knowledge, I passed at length the narrow seas into France with Sir Edward Stafford, where during my five years abroad with him in his dangerous and chargeable residency in Her Highness’s service, 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 especially in so long and happy a time of peace, either ignominiously reported, or exceedingly condemned.

Thus both hearing, and reading the obloquy 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 the reproachers, myself being the last winter returned from France 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. I call the work a burden, in consideration that these voyages lay so dispersed, scattered and hidden in several hucksters’ hands, that I now wonder at myself, to see how I was able to endure the delays, curiosity, and backwardness of many from whom I was to receive the originals.

To harp no longer upon this string, and to speak a word of that just commendation which our nation does indeed deserve: it cannot be denied, but as in all former ages, they have been men full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of the most remote parts of the world, so in this most famous and peerless government of Her most excellent Majesty, her subjects, in compassing the vast globe of the world more than once, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth. For, which of the kings of this land before Her Majesty, had their banners ever seen in the Caspian Sea? Which of them hath ever dealt with the Emperor of Persia, as Her Majesty hath done, and obtained for her merchants large and loving privileges? Who ever found English Consuls and agents at Tripolis in Syria, at Aleppo, at Babylon, at Basra, and which is more, whoever heard of Englishmen at Goa before now? What English ships did heretofore ever anchor in the mighty river of Plate? Pass and re-pass the unpassable (in former opinion) strait of Magellan, range along the coast of Chile, Peru, and all the backside of Nova Hispania,¹ further than any Christian ever passed, traverse the mighty breadth of the South Sea, land upon the Luzones² in despite of the enemy, enter into alliance, amity and traffic with the princes of the Moluccas, and the isle of Java, double the famous Cape of Bona Speranza, arrive at the isle of St Helena, and last of all return home most richly laden with the commodities of China, as the subjects of this now flourishing monarchy have done?

[Preface to the first edition] Richard Hakluyt to the favourable Reader.

I have thought it very requisite for thy further instruction and direction in this history (good reader) to acquaint thee briefly with the method and order which I have used in the whole course thereof: and by the way also to let thee understand by whose friendly aid in this my travel I have been furthered.

I meddle in this work with the navigations only of our own nation: and albeit I allege in a few places (as the manner and occasion required) some strangers as witnesses of the things done, yet are they none but such as either faithfully remember or sufficiently confirm the travels of our own people.

I must crave thy further patience (friendly reader) in acquainting thee with those virtuous gentlemen, which have yielded me their several good assistances. Master Richard Staper merchant of London, hath furnished me with divers things touching the trade of Turkey and other places in the east. Master William Burrough, Clerk of Her Majesty’s Navy, and Master Anthony Jenkinson, both gentlemen of great experience and observation in the north regions, have much pleasured me. Beside mine own extreme travail in the histories of the Spaniards, my chiefest light hath been received from Sir John Hawkins, Sir Walter Raleigh, and my kinsman Master Richard Hakluyt of the Middle Temple.

I have contented myself with inserting into the work one of the best general maps of the world only, until the coming out of a very large and most exact terrestrial globe, collected and reformed according to the newest, secretest and latest discoveries, both Spanish, Portugal and English, composed by Mr Emery Molineux of Lambeth, a rare gentleman in his profession.

This being the sum of those things which I thought good to admonish thee of (good reader) it remaineth that thou take the profit and pleasure of the work: which I wish to be as great to thee, as my pains and labour have been in bringing these raw fruits unto this ripeness, and in reducing these loose papers into this order. Farewell.

[Preface to the second edition, 1598] A preface to the reader as touching the principal voyages.

Having for the benefit and honour of my country zealously bestowed so many years, so much travail and cost, to bring antiquities smothered and buried in dark silence, to light, and to preserve certain memorable exploits of late years by our English nation achieved, from the greedy and devouring jaws of oblivion: to gather likewise, and as it were to incorporate into one body the torn and scattered limbs of our ancient and late navigations by sea, our voyages by land, and traffics of merchandise by both: I do this second time (friendly reader) presume to offer unto thy view this discourse. For the bringing of which into this homely and rough-hewn shape, which here thou seest, what restless nights, what painful days, what heat, what cold I have endured; how many long and chargeable journeys I have travelled; how many famous libraries I have searched into; what variety of ancient and modern writers I have perused, what expenses I have not spared; and yet what fair opportunities of private gain, preferment, and ease I have neglected. Howbeit, the honour and benefit of this Commonweal wherein I live and breathe hath made all difficulties seem easy.

Be it granted that the renowned Portugal Vasco da Gama traversed the main ocean southward of Africa. Did not Richard Chancellor and his mates perform the like, northward of Europe? Suppose that Columbus that noble and high-spirited Genoese escried unknown lands to the westward of Europe and Africa: did not the valiant English knight Sir Hugh Willoughby; did not the famous pilots Stephen Burrough, Arthur Pet, and Charles Jackman accost Novaya Zemlya³ to the north of Europe and Asia? Howbeit you will say perhaps, not with the like golden success, not with such deductions of colonies, nor attaining of conquests. True it is, that our success