Introduction

No known contemporary portrait survives of Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616), whose assiduous role as editor, translator, and purveyor of travel accounts made him the leading promoter of English commercial and colonial expansion in the late Tudor and early Stuart period. While Samuel Purchas, inheritor of his manuscripts and mission, had his image engraved on the title page of Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), Hakluyt was content with a more modest profile. In the prefatory materials included in his major work, The Principal Navigations (1589; expanded 1598–1600), he presented himself as a tireless worker in the archives, assembling texts amid the dust of libraries and expending vast labours and personal sums to ensure the completion of his project. ¹ If Hakluyt himself has in a sense ‘vanished’, as his most recent biographer, Peter Mancall, has observed, ² then what remains are monuments to others whose work he preserved and promoted. These include the hundreds of participants in his travel compilations, some of them among the most eminent and influential individuals of the period associated with English exploration, travel, and colonial settlement (such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Francis Drake, and Sir Martin Frobisher), together with many more who would otherwise have disappeared. This volume attempts to recover the context of Hakluyt’s editorial practice, and the world of economic, political, and colonial competition that shaped it, in order to begin to fill in that missing portrait.