ABSTRACT
Richard Hakluyt was a creature of texts and a master manipulator of words. Most of his books about travel and exploration featured the words of others – testimonials from voyagers, primarily, but also opinions about geography and discoveries. 1 At times he included maps – such as those by Robert Thorne and Michael Lok in Divers Voyages – to support points argued in the documents. The two editions of The Principal Navigations prove that Hakluyt searched far and wide for exactly the right words to fill his volumes. He travelled to archives and read scores of printed books, which he then plundered for his own collections. One seventeenth-century English writer, the antiquary Anthony à Wood, reported that Hakluyt even loitered around the docks gathering stories from sailors recently returned from long-distance voyages. 2
