ABSTRACT
In 1916, while a student in private study, C. S. Lewis wrote to his father about ‘a fine article on Hakluyt in this weeks [sic] Literary Supplement’, and suggested that ‘a good deal of it might stand as an apology – in the Newman sense of course – for my hours spent on poor Mandeville’. 1 By this the young Lewis means that the contents of the Times Literary Supplement article, Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Great Adventurers’, vindicates his efforts studying a fourteenth-century travel narrative by the probably fictional English author Sir John Mandeville. 2 Lewis would also later work with this text as a don at the University of Oxford, where excerpts from it were included in the undergraduate English curriculum. Mandeville’s Travels charts the narrator’s supposed voyages from England to the Holy Land and beyond, to exotic locales like Cathay (China), the legendary Prester John’s Christian kingdom, and numerous islands populated by fantastical races. De la Mare’s article seems to have called up Mandeville for Lewis because it celebrates the life and work of Richard Hakluyt, an author who wrote, edited, and translated books about English voyages and exploration during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. According to de la Mare, Hakluyt ‘traversed no more salt water than washes through the English channel’, but was nonetheless able to bring the world – and English encounters with it – to the English reader, and ‘illuminated the Antipodes and dwelt on scenes of wonder, strangeness, extremity, and beauty beyond the dreams of the Opium Eater or the fantasies of a Sheherazade’. 3 For this, de la Mare calls Hakluyt ‘a patriot in the rarest and finest of senses, in that he foresaw England’s true greatness while it was yet only part achieved; and laboured all his life long to inspire and expedite her progress towards it’. 4 The ‘true greatness’ to which England would rise seems a reference to the British Empire, which was only just beginning to wane at the time that de la Mare (an author and poet known predominantly for his writing for children) wrote his TLS article. 5
