ABSTRACT
In his 1598 Preface, Richard Hakluyt distinguished between the voyages in the northern seas, where the English were explorers and innovators, and the voyages in the more southern seas, where they were only following up the Portuguese and the Spaniards. Moreover, the printed voyages concentrated on a small part of Africa. Hope and the east African coast, Hakluyt's material on Africa was limited in geographical coverage to the first fifteen hundred miles of the four thousand miles of coastline of middle Africa, that is, to the Guinea coast up to the Benin river. About a score of the voyages narrated in any detail in Principal navigations were to Guinea and contain material on the region. In general, Principal navigations has not yet been thoroughly investigated by historians of Africa, and evidence from it is likely to prove even more useful during the next few years of research.
