ABSTRACT
In late January 1601, just two weeks before launching its inaugural voyage, the London-based East India Company (EIC) called on the assistance of ‘Mr Hacklett’. Aside from five years spent in Paris as chaplain to the English ambassador, Richard Hakluyt never travelled much, nor was he a merchant or courtier. The role played by the collector of travel literature in furnishing the nascent EIC with actionable intelligence reveals the intimate ties between early modern trading companies and the written record of global travel. With Hakluyt and Linschoten authors have identified chronological starting point of this volume, but their form of travel literature – vast collections of information carefully edited and published for a wider, public market – is not its principal thematic focus. Although manuscript accounts of foreign travel circulated throughout the medieval period, it was only in second half of the sixteenth century that, in the words of Donald Lach, ‘Europe was deluged with materials on the overseas world’.
