Richard Hakluyt
born c. 1552, London?
died Nov. 23, 1616, England
English geographer noted for his political
influence, his voluminous writings, and his
persistent promotion of Elizabethan overseas
expansion, especially the colonization of North
America. His major publication, The principall
Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the
English nation, provides almost everything known
about the early English voyages to North
America.
Hakluyt’s family was of some social standing in
the Welsh Marches and held property at Eaton.
His father died when Richard was five years old,
leaving his family to the care of a cousin,
another Richard Hakluyt, a lawyer who had many
friends among prominent city merchants,
geographers, and explorers of the day. Because
of these connections, and his own expertise in
overseas trade and economics, the man was well
placed to assist young Richard in his life work.
With the help of various scholarships,
Hakluyt was educated at Westminster School and
Christ Church, Oxford, entering in 1570 and
taking his M.A. degree in 1577. His interest in
geography and travel had been aroused on a visit
to the Middle Temple, one of the four English
legal societies, while in his early teens. As he
writes in the “Epistle dedicatorie” to The
principall Navigations, his cousin spoke to him
of recent discoveries and of the new
opportunities for trade and showed him “certeine
bookes of Cosmographie, with an universall Mappe.”
His imagination thus stirred, the schoolboy had
thereupon resolved to “prosecute that knowledge
and kinde of literature” at the university. Some
time before 1580 he took holy orders, and,
though he never shirked his religious duties, he
spent considerable time reading whatever
accounts he could find about contemporary
voyages and discoveries.
Hakluyt also gave public lectures—he is
regarded as the first professor of modern
geography at Oxford—and was the first to display
both the olde imperfectly composed, and the
new lately reformed Mappes, Globes, Spheares,
and other instruments of this Art for
demonstration in the common schooles.
He made a point also of becoming acquainted with
the most important sea captains, merchants, and
sailors of England. This was the time when
English attention was fixed on finding the
northeast and northwest passages to the Orient,
and on Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the
world. Hakluyt was concerned with the activities
of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher,
who were both searching for a passage to the
East; was consulting Abraham Ortelius, compiler
of the world’s first atlas, and Gerardus
Mercator, the Flemish mapmaker, on
cosmographical problems; and was gaining
approval for future overseas exploration from
such politically prominent men as Lord Burghley,
Sir Francis Walsingham, and Sir Robert Cecil. He
thus embarked upon his career as a “publicist
and a counsellor for present and future national
enterprises across the ocean.” His policy,
constantly expounded, was the exploration of
temperate North America in conjunction with the
search for the Northwest Passage, the
establishment of England’s claim to possession
based on the discovery of North America by John
and Sebastian Cabot, and the foundation of a
“plantation” to foster national trade and
national well-being. These views are first set
out in the preface he wrote to John Florio’s
translation of an account of Jacques Cartier’s
voyage to Canada, which he induced Florio to
undertake, and are further developed in his
first important work, Divers voyages touching
the discouerie of America (1582). In this he
also pleaded for the establishment of a
lectureship in navigation. In 1583 Walsingham,
then one of the most important secretaries of
state, sent Hakluyt to Paris as chaplain to Sir
Edward Stafford, the English ambassador there.
He served in Paris also as a kind of
intelligence officer, collecting information on
the fur trade of Canada and on overseas
enterprises from French and exiled Portuguese
pilots. In support of Walter Raleigh’s
colonizing project in Virginia, he prepared a
report, known briefly as The Discourse on the
Western Planting (written in 1584), which set
out very forcefully the political and economic
benefits from such a colony and the necessity
for state financial support of the project. This
was presented to Queen Elizabeth I, who rewarded
Hakluyt with a prebend (ecclesiastical post) at
Bristol cathedral but took no steps to help
Raleigh. The Discourse, a secret report, was not
printed until 1877. In Paris, Hakluyt also
edited an edition of the De Orbe Novo of Pietro
Martire so that his countrymen might have
knowledge of the early successes and failures of
the Spaniards in the New World.
Hakluyt returned to London in 1588. The
outbreak of war with Spain put an end to the
effectiveness of overseas propaganda and the
opportunity for further exploration so he began
work on a project that he had had in mind for
some time. This was The principall Navigations,
Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation .
. . , which, by its scholarship and
comprehensiveness, transcended all geographical
literature to date; the first edition, in one
volume, appeared in 1589. About this time he
married Duglesse Cavendish, a relative of Thomas
Cavendish, the circumnavigator, and was
appointed to the parish of Wetheringsett in
Suffolk. Until after the death of his wife in
1597, little is heard of any geographical work,
but he then completed the greatly enlarged
second edition of the Voyages, which appeared in
three volumes between 1598 and 1600. Shortly
before its completion, he was granted by the
Queen the next vacant prebend at Westminster so
that he might be at hand to advise on colonial
affairs. He gave information to the newly formed
East India Company and continued his interest in
the North American colonizing project; he was
one of the chief promoters of the petition to
the crown for patents to colonize Virginia in
1606 and at one point contemplated a voyage to
the colony. Nor did his belief in the
possibility of Arctic passages to the East fade,
for he was also a charter member of the
Northwest Passage Company of 1612. In 1613
appeared the Pilgrimage of Samuel Purchas,
another clergyman fascinated with the new
discoveries of the age; in spirit, it was a
continuation of Hakluyt’s own work, and the two
editors probably became acquainted. Purchas
procured some of Hakluyt’s manuscripts after his
death and used them in Hakluytus Posthumus or
Purchas his Pilgrimes of 1625.
Works by Hakluyt in addition to those
mentioned above include translations of Antonio
Galvão’s Discoveries of the World . . . (1601)
and of Hernando de Soto’s account of Florida,
under the title Virginia richly valued by the
description of . . . Florida . . . (1609). But
it is the Voyages that remain his memorial.
This, the prose epic of the English nation, is
more than a documentary history of exploration
and adventure; with tales of daring it mingles
historical, diplomatic, and economic papers to
establish British right to sovereignty at sea
and to a place in overseas settlement. Its
overriding purpose was to stimulate, guide, and
encourage an undertaking of incalculable
national import. Hakluyt was not blind to the
profits arising from foreign trade. It has been
asserted that the income of the East India
Company was increased by £20,000 through a study
of Hakluyt’s Voyages.
Gerald Roe Crone
