ABSTRACT
Between 1550 and 1557 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, a life-long civil servant and secretary to the Venetian Council of Ten, compiled the three-volume text, Della Navigationi et Viaggi, the final volume of which was published posthumously in 1559. This monumental work was composed of different travel narratives, edited and arranged to create a new style of world geography, presented through the words of the eyewitness voyager. The two editions of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations (1589/1598–1600), particularly the second, compiled nearly fifty years after Ramusio’s work, were in many ways the closest heirs to the Venetian’s geography 1 Like Ramusio, Hakluyt thought that the world could best be known through eyewitness reports, though he used a much broader spectrum of documents than Ramusio. Except for certain discorsi, Ramusio published only narratives, whereas Hakluyt included a variety of works such as ships’ logs, navigational instructions, proclamations, letters, and travelogues. Hakluyt was a product of the ‘humanistic, Aristotelian culture’ of late sixteenth-century Oxford, and, like Ramusio, was a classically trained scholar, although he was less interested in pure humanist methods in editing his texts. 2 While Ramusio largely wished to create a geography of the newly discovered regions of the world to supplement the work of classical writers, Hakluyt had more nationalistic and imperial aims.
