The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation — Volume 01

Produced by Karl Hagen, Juliet Sutherland,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Transcriber's Notes
The printed edition from which this e-text has been produced retains the spelling and abreviations of Hakluyt's 16th-century original. In this version, the spelling has been retained, but the following manuscript abbreviations have been silently expanded:
End Transcriber's Notes
THE PRINCIPAL Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries OF THE ENGLISH NATION.
Collected by RICHARD HAKLUYT, PREACHER
AND Edited by EDMUND GOLDSMIDT, F.R.H.S.
This elaborate and excellent Collection, which redounds as much to the glory of the English Nation as any book that ever was published, has already had sufficient complaints made in its behalf against our suffering it to become so scarce and obscure, by neglecting to republish it in a fair impression, with proper illustrations and especially an Index . But there may still be room left for a favourable construction of such neglect, and the hope that nothing but the casual scarcity of a work so long since out of print may have prevented its falling into those able hands that might, by such an edition, have rewarded the eminent Examples preserved therein, the Collector thereof and themselves according to their deserts.
The three volumes of the Second Edition therefore together contain Five hundred and seventeen separate narratives. When to this we add those narratives included in the First Edition, but omitted in the Second, all the voyages printed by Hakluyt or at his suggestion, such as Divers Voyages touching the Discoverie of America, The Conquest of Terra Florida, The Historie of the West Indies, &c., &c., and many of the publications of the Hakluyt Society, some idea may be formed of the magnitude of the undertaking. I trust the notes and illustrations I have appended may prove useful to students and ordinary readers; I can assure any who may be disposed to cavil at their brevity that many a line has cost me hours of research. In conclusion, a short account of the previous editions of Hakluyt's Voyages may be found useful.