HAKLUYT, Richard

(1552-1616)

Richard Hakluyt was an English author and geographer who compiled and wrote The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Na­tion, which contains most of what we know about early English voyages to North America. Born in London, Hakluyt was the second child of Margery and Richard Hakluyt. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, and took his master of arts degree in 1577. His interest in geography and travel was sparked when, as a young student, he visited his cousin (another Richard Hakluyt), who was a lawyer in the Middle Temple. The elder Hakluyt had connections among merchants, geographers, and explorers, as well as books with maps and travel tales, which caught the young Hakluyt s imagination. After taking his master of arts, he began reading every voyage narrative he could acquire and developed his linguistic skills so that he could read Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French narratives as well as those in English. Hakluyt was ordained in 1580, and though he was always conscientious in his religious duties, his passion continued to be geography and travel.

In 1582 he published the Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie ofAmerica, a collection of documents in support of the priority of England s claim to Amer­ica, including suggestions to Englishmen who might want to further such claims. Hakluyt spent the years 1583-88 between Paris and London, consulting with sea captains, merchants, sailors, and exiles who had been to America and reading their manuscript accounts. Accusations abroad of English laziness toward col­onization combined with an impressive European competition in acquiring knowledge of the New World led Hakluyt to beg for the establishment of a lectureship in navigation in London. His Discourse on Western Planting, a secret memorandum finished in 1584 but not published until 1877, was written at Sir Walter Raleigh s* request and was given to the queen to support Raleigh s Virginia plans. Before leaving Paris, Hakluyt also edited an edition of Peter Martyr d Anghiera s* De orbe novo (On the New World, 1587) in order to inform his countrymen of the Spanish experiences in the New World.

War broke out with Spain in 1588, and on his return to London, Hakluyt began the Principall Navigations, which appeared in 1589 as a stout folio pro­duced by the queen s printer. In 1590 Hakluyt was appointed rector at Weth-eringsett, Suffolk, and he married Duglesse Cavendish (a relative of Thomas Cavendish, the circumnavigator), who bore him his only child, Edmond, in 1593 and died four years later. The greatly enlarged second edition of the Principall Navigations appeared in three volumes between 1598 and 1600. After being granted the prebend at Westminster, Hakluyt began consulting for the East India Company and other colonial interests. He married Frances Smithe in 1604, be­came a rector of Gedney, Lincolnshire, in 1612, and died in London the same year as William Shakespeare,* in 1616.

Hakluyt's influence on Elizabethan colonial efforts and on the much later nineteenth-century imperial agenda of England cannot be overstated. His asso­ciations with figures such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher (seekers of a passage to the east), Abraham Ortelius and Gerardus Mercator* (famous mapmakers), and Lord Burghley, Sir Francis Walsingham, and Sir Rob­ert Cecil (powerful political figures in England), as well as the influence of his Principall Navigations, make Hakluyt the most important English promoter of geographical knowledge of his time.

Bibliography

G. Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, 1928.

D. Quinn, ed., The Hakluyt Handbook, 2 vols., 1974.

Richard J. Ring