Beyond the bare data of his birth and antecedents the story of Richard Hakluyt’s life is gathered largely from his own writings, found for the most part in shreds of autobiography running through the several extended “Epistles Dedicatorie” introducing his published volumes. It is a winsome and an inspiriting story of a man of action behind the scenes of great performances rather than in the forefront: of a singularly modest man not forth-pressing among his contemporaries, yet ranking in great accomplishments with the best of “Queen Elizabeth’s men.”
Even the exact place and date of his birth are not stated by any of his biographers. All that appears to be definitely fixed is that he was born near London about the year 1553. That was the year that Edmund Spenser was born; one year after the birth of Sir Walter Raleigh, and one year before the birth of Sir Philip Sidney, both of whom were to become his confrères in schemes of American colonization. He was five years old when Elizabeth came to the throne. Eleven years after his birth Shakspere was born, and he died the same year that Shakspere died. Thus we have the chronology of his life, 1553–1616, his active career extending through the blossom and the bloom of the dazzling Elizabethan period.
Richard Hakluyt was of an ancient Hertfordshire family, dating back in that historic county to the thirteenth century. The family seat was at Yatton, or Eyton, not far from the old town of Leominster. They were of Welsh extraction, and our cosmographer may have indulged a personal pride in the legend of “the most ancient discovery of the West Indies,” made by a Welshman in the twelfth century, three hundred years before Columbus. Hakluyts appear to have been early preferred for public station in Hertfordshire. The name (then generally spelled Hackluit) is found in the lists of high sheriffs for the county from the reign of Edward the second to Henry the eighth. In the second year of Henry the fourth Leonard Hackluit, knight, was sheriff. Walter Hakelut was knighted in the thirty-fourth year of Edward the first. Others of the name are seen among early members of Parliament. Thomas Hakeluyt was chancellor of the diocese of Hertford in 1349, in the latter part of Edward the third’s reign. Richard Hakluyt of Yatton, afterward of London, an elder cousin of our Richard, was a cosmographer before him, and esteemed in his time “as well by some principal ministers of state as by several most noted persons among the mercantile part of the kingdom, as a great encourager of navigation and improvement of trade, art, and manufactures.”
Our Richard Hakluyt was the second of four brothers, all of whom were liberally educated. The eldest, Thomas, was trained at the Westminster School and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a celebrated physician. Richard followed Thomas at the Westminster School when he was fourteen years old, being elected one of the queen’s scholars to that “fruitfull nurserie,” as he terms it. He remained at Westminster for six years and then passed up to Christ College, Oxford. While a schoolboy the love of geography and maritime discovery was implanted in him by his cousin Richard, and so agreeably that he determined to make the pursuit of these branches of science his life-avocation. How this came about let him relate in his own quaint language, translated, for more comfortable reading, into modern English.
“I do remember that being a youth and one of her Majesty’s scholars at Westminster, that fruitful nursery, it was my hap to visit the chamber of M. Richard Hakluyt, my cousin, a Gentleman of the Middle Temple, well known unto you, at a time when I found lying open upon his board certain books of Cosmography with an universal Map. He seeing me somewhat curious in the view thereof began to instruct my ignorance by shewing me the division of the earth into three parts after the old account, and then according to the latter & better distribution, into more: he pointed with his wand to all the known Seas, Gulfs, Bays, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdoms, Dukedoms, and Territories of each part; with declaration also of their special commodities & particular wants, which by the benefit of traffic & intercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied. From the Map he brought me to the Bible, and turning to the 107 Psalm, directed me to the 23 & 24 verses, where I read, that they which go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep, &c. Which words of the Prophet together with my cousin’s discourse (things of high and rare delight to my young nature) took in me so deep an impression, that I constantly resolved, if ever I were preferred to the University, where better time and more convenient place might be ministered for their studies, would by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature, the doors of which whereof (after a sort) were so happily opened before me.”
Hakluyt entered Oxford in 1570, and took the degree of bachelor of arts in 1574 and master of arts in 1577. While diligently and faithfully pursuing the regular college course, true to his boyhood resolution he devoted all his spare time to his self imposed studies. He became so proficient in them that after taking his master’s degree he was chosen to read “public lectures” on the science of cosmography and navigation. The lectures were delivered presumably in London and with much satisfaction to his hearers, among whom we may be sure were found master mariners and common seamen, as his relation proceeds:
“When not long after I was removed to Christ-Church in Oxford, my exercise of duty first performed, I fell to my intended course, and by degrees read over whatsoever printed and written discoveries and voyages I found extant either in the Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portugal [Portuguese], French, or English languages, and in my public lectures was the first that produced and shewed both the old and imperfectly composed, and the new lately reformed Maps, Globes, Spheres, and other instruments of this Art for demonstration in the common schools, to the singular pleasure and general contentment of my auditory.”
Possibly at these lectures, certainly soon after, he was advocating with much earnestness the pressing need of popular technical education to produce informed and skilful mariners, and this he continued persistently to urge in all his after writings. He would have had established in London a lectureship, or a school of nautical crafts, from which English seamen might be graduated complete navigators. To this end he dwelt much upon the advantages of the navigators of rival nations, gained largely through their scientific training. At that time Spain was maintaining in Seville, at the “Contractation House,” or Exchange, a “Learned Reader” in the art of navigation and a board of examiners, of which the reader was a member, and no man in Spain could obtain the charge of a ship for the Indies till he had attended the reader’s course and had passed the examining board. A century earlier the “hero nation” of Portugal had established a school of navigation, instituted by that heroic figure in maritime discovery, Prince Henry, surnamed “The Navigator.” Despite, however, the force of Hakluyt’s sound arguments, and the endorsement of his proposition by such seasoned mariners as Sir Francis Drake and by various men of affairs, the lectureship never was founded, greatly to his regret.
When Hakluyt began his studies in cosmography systematically the only English work at his hand touching the subject was the Historie of Travayle by Richard Eden, dating from 1555. This was the first work of its kind produced in England, and a new edition was brought out while Hakluyt was a student at Oxford. Although it was a classic from a scholarly Englishman, it presented only a limited view of maritime discovery. Consequently the young student was obliged to pursue his investigations chiefly in various foreign works, and among manuscripts deposited in private libraries or collections. He had not progressed far before he had become impressed with the backwardness of England in Western occupation since the discovery of the North American continent under her auspices in 1497 and 1498. Great deeds had been performed by intrepid English explorers to the North and Northeast, and English commerce had been advanced in the rich regions of the East; but on the Western continent no further attempt of moment toward exploration or settlement had been made by Englishmen from the finish of Henry the seventh’s reign to Elizabeth’s time. Meanwhile other nations had established foothold in these “fair and fruitful parts,” to England’s disadvantage. Thus Hakluyt came clearly to see that maritime traffic united with American colonization must be the means that England should adopt, without further delay, if she were to improve the condition of her people and become a naval power in the world.
Imbued with these convictions he early set out, perhaps while still delivering the “Public Lectures,” definitely to promote this policy with voice and pen. Early he is found in close touch with men leading in state affairs and in bold enterprises. He is much in correspondence with Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s chief secretary. He gets points from Sir Francis Drake after that great navigator’s return, in 1580, from the first circumnavigation of the globe by an Englishman, loaded with treasure, the spoil of Spanish harbours on the Pacific, and crowned with honours for the discovery of California for the English and its occupation as “New Albion.” He has intimate intercourse with Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to whom, in 1578, Elizabeth had given her letters patent to discover and to colonize “remote, heathen, and barbarous lands”—the first grant of the kind ever made by an English sovereign,—and, as we have seen, prepares his first book, Divers Voyages, in aid of Sir Humphrey’s project. Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half-brother and associate, who had known Hakluyt and was conversant with his studies in cosmography when he was at college, became his patron. Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicates the Divers Voyages, had been his fellow-student at Oxford.