ABSTRACT
The Elizabethans wrote history as well as making it. The stately progression of the chronicles – Hall, Holinshed, Stow, Speed, Camden – is witness of the interest of sixteenth-century Englishmen in England's past. Richard Hakluyt set out to publish, in orderly geographical and chronological sequence, 'the maritime record of our own men'. Camden, representing the culmination of a long tradition of chronicle making, was Hakluyt's contemporary and friend. Repeatedly Hakluyt reflected the hankering of his contemporaries for continuity and ancient precedent. Where the 'record of our own men' was deficient, Hakluyt supplemented it from the records of foreigners, and so produced a work much more complete, and more efficient for his practical purposes, than its predecessor. Hakluyt was not only a patriotic, conscientious and on the whole critical historian; he was a magnanimous one. Hakluyt's on British history, or any history, have to be pieced together from his dedications and prefaces, and inferred from his choice of documents.
