ABSTRACT
Richard Hakluyt’s stated intention in The Principall Navigations in 1589 was to rouse the English from their ‘sluggish security’ to emulate the achievements of ‘other nations miraculously extolled for their discoveries and notable enterprises by sea’. 1 In 1599, in the second volume of the second edition of The Principal Navigations, he repeated this call for his countrymen to leave ‘those soft unprofitable pleasures wherein they now too much consume their time and patrimonie’. 2 Yet to judge by the remark of Thomas Platter, a Swiss physician travelling in England in 1599, Hakluyt’s English contemporaries still remained reluctant to venture abroad and largely derived their information about the rest of the world from attending the theatre:
With these and many more amusements the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad … since the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home. 3
