‘His Dark Materials'

Must we read Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations all the way through? The standards of modern scholarship would unequivocally say ‘yes’. But how to do so is a more interesting question. Certainly I found that when I first began systematically to read through The Principal Navigations, it was a struggle to stay awake. Perhaps circumstances were partly at fault: I began the twelve-volume James MacLehose and Sons edition of The Principal Navigations (1598–1600) during a hot summer, on a very comfortable couch.