ABSTRACT
Richard Hakluyt’s well-known collection of documents, the Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1598-1600), offers modern readers a snapshot of what a well-connected and energetic editor could muster, in the way of primary sources, on travel outside of Europe by Englishmen at the end of the sixteenth century. The anthology gathers and makes accessible key documents in English colonial history and English maritime history more generally: Thomas Hariot and Walter Raleigh on the Americas, accounts of Francis Drake’s circumnavigation and the defeat of the Armada, and so on. It also offers unique accounts of places which had no writing or no practice of narrative history, and so continues to be a resource for regional histories and ethno-histories in both the Old World and the New. Most broadly, Hakluyt’s book assembles accounts of English actions-travel to Muscovy, Benin, Chile, the Azores, or Baffin Island-, of the people they encountered when they did go there, and of the profit, literal or not, mutual or not, which resulted from these encounters.
