ABSTRACT
How is one to read Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations? On the one hand, its often-repeated identification as a national epic confirms how strongly Hakluyt’s unifying authority demands to be privileged over the texts that he brings together, creating a narrative drive which ties the disparate and scattered records of English travels into a single, celebratory, and teleological account of progress and growth. On the other, both the sheer size and nature of Hakluyt’s text identify it as a compendium that is forever fragmented, the product of multiple intellectual, political, and mercantile interests. When we refer to ‘Hakluyt’, it has been pointed out, the word signifies not just the individual, but also that entire collection of other travellers and explorers, not all necessarily English, whose accounts make up the presentation of what Richard Helgerson calls the ‘proleptic’ history of England as a mercantile nation. 1 In this essay I want to take a fresh look at that tension between the two forms of narrative momentum in Hakluyt’s text – the unifying versus the fragmenting and fragmentary – by attending to a section that underwent significant alterations between the two editions of The Principal Navigations. The changing shape of this collection of accounts about India is influenced by one of Hakluyt’s most significant material interventions, his function as an advisor to the nascent East India Company. Reading them in the light of Hakluyt’s developing editorial rationale and the mercantile context behind his subject matter, I would suggest, can offer us a way into that negotiation between individual and collective voice which both characterizes and complicates Hakluyt’s monumental text.
