ABSTRACT
The remark has often been made that Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Navigations (1589) changed English travel writing. Rather than looking at his collection as a means of changing English attitudes towards travel, this essay will consider how Hakluyt changed travel writings themselves, from letters, records, or separately published pamphlets, into a few pages of text in a large folio collection of travel documents. I will leave aside for a moment the ideological implications of the content of Hakluyt’s work, and instead consider the ideology of its form. 1 Focusing on shifts that occur in the paratextual material of Thomas Saunders’s captivity narrative as Hakluyt edits a tale originally published as a popular pamphlet for inclusion in the first edition of his collection, this essay will demonstrate how small editorial changes in the form of an account can affect the ideological implications of the narrative as a whole.
