ABSTRACT
The reader of narrative and descriptive passages in Richard Hakluyt must be struck by an absence of contrived lexical effects which is very remarkable for an age of such acute linguistic self-consciousness. The language of accounts may be derivative, but a study of the original writings from the hand of Hakluyt shows clearly enough that he does not succumb to the delights of exotic vocabulary where the starkly simple will suffice. In his use of the native resources of the language, Hakluyt likewise shows a discriminating inventiveness. In sentence structure as in vocabulary the prose-writer of Hakluyt's day had a wide range of choices to make. When we reflect that oral narrative and description are never very far behind the native English accounts given in Hakluyt's Principal navigations it is not hard to see why so much of the writing in them is unobscure and readily readable.
