ABSTRACT

When the founders o f the Hakluyt Society defined its object a hundred years ago they gave it as the printing o f ‘ rare and valuable Voyages, Travels, Naval Expeditions, and other geo­ graphical records’ . They were gathered to carry on the tradition o f Hakluyt, and they assumed that Hakluyt was a geographer and nothing else. To us who read Hakluyt’s works to-day it is evident that he was also an economist, a historian and a public advocate o f colonization and discovery. W hy were our pre­ decessors content to rate him solely as a geographer? The answer may be that history at that time dealt almost exclusively with our domestic politics and the relations o f the European powers. There was, it is true, a considerable body o f historical work on India, but its interest depended largely upon its bearing on British politics. Macaulay was a writer o f wide scope who reviewed important books as they appeared, and the subjects o f his historical essays all fall in the above categories. The annals o f commerce ranked rather as useful knowledge than as history. The oceanic history o f which Hakluyt had laid the foundation, the true prelude to the building o f the British empire, had lost the position he had made for it as an essential part o f the national record, and, as history, was hardly in the consciousness o f the early nineteenth century at all. In that great matter the tradition o f Hakluyt was almost lost. The Hakluyt Society therefore de­ fined its work as geographical. But its two hundred and twentyfive volumes were to build up, nevertheless, a collection o f material whose interest became increasingly historical as the scope o f history expanded to embrace it, and the Society’s century o f achievement can be seen to represent all sides o f Hakluyt’s effort.