Hakluyt's Voyages

I N an age when tales of strange voyages are reasserting their age-old fascination, when any strange craft from Heyerdahl's primitive balsa raft to Beebe's super-scientific bathysphere is almost sure to produce a best seller, an older classic of the literature of discovery deserves to be known. I call it an epic, though it was not primarily intended as a work of literature at all; most of its many authors were blunt men of action, to whom the pen was an unwieldy instrument at best. Yet in one sense my title is not a misnomer, since the book possesses to a high degree many of the qualities which distinguish the great epics-in its setting, which is the oceans of the world, from the arctic ice north of Russia to the islands of the South Seas; in its recurring tales of conflict between man and man and between man and the elemental forces of nature; and in its theme, the turning outward of England from insularity to empire, and the growing resolve of Englishmen to make up by courageous and often unscrupulous action for their tardiness in accepting the challenge of the new-found lands across the sea. book deserves to be known by its full, mouth-filling Elizabethan title: The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or over-land, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth, at any time within the compasse of these i500 yeeres.... By Richard Hakluyt. Less leisurely ages have shortened this title to Hakluyt's Voyages-a misleading abbreviation, since Hakluyt is the author of very few of the accounts he edited, and himself never took a longer voyage than across the English Channel.I first edition appeared in I589. Coming as it did on the heels of the great maritime victory over the Spanish Armada, it had a success which encouraged its compiler to expand it from one to three large folio volumes, which appeared in successive years from i598 to i6oo. Even in the somewhat cut-down Everyman's Library edition it fills eight volumes, about 3,200 ordinary pages. To read it through is a task recommended only to those plodders who

Art · EPIC · Literature · Historical Geography and Cartography · History

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