Hakluyt planned to accompany Gilbert’s fatal expedition of 1583, but before its departure he was appointed chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, the queen’s ambassador to Paris. This preferment evidently came to him directly through his interest in nautical affairs. Those who obtained it for him believed that his services to the cause of Western discoveries and colonization would then be most valuable from that post of observation and influence. Walsingham expected him to make diligent enquiry of “such things as may yield any light unto our Western discoveries,” and he justified this hope by undertaking shrewdly to collect information of the movements of the Spanish and as well the French, and to recommend measures for the furtherance of the cause which he had most at heart. No sooner was he established at Paris than he became absorbed in this special mission, and it continued almost his sole occupation while he remained with the embassy, which was for a period of five years.
Upon the failure of the Gilbert enterprise and the loss of Sir Humphrey he is ardently enlisted in Raleigh’s project, furnishing in its interest, at Raleigh’s request, “discourses both in print and written hand.” These “discourses” are supposed to have been embodied in Raleigh’s memorial to the queen which brought him his patent of March, 1584, as liberal as Gilbert’s. The important document on Mr. Rawley’s Voyage, or A Particular Discourse on Western planting, may have embodied some of the features of the memorial. Hakluyt wrote the “Discourse” in London when ostensibly on a summer vacation from his duties at Paris. At the same time he was busied in judicious “trumpeting” of the enterprise among statesmen and merchant adventurers.
He continued hand in hand with Raleigh through the latter’s repeated attempts to plant his Virginia colonies, encouragingly buoyant and hopeful in each new venture following dismal and sometimes tragic failure; and he became foremost in the company of gentlemen and merchants to whom Raleigh was compelled to assign his patent in 1588. Afterward, upon the accession of James the first, he was the chief promoter of a petition to the king for a new grant of patents for Virginia colonization that brought the royal charter of April, 1606, under which were formed the corporations subsequently known as the London and the Plymouth companies, between whom was to be equally divided the great tract of country lying between the thirty-fourth and the forty-fifth degrees of latitude and reaching to the backwoods without bound. He was made one of the patentees of the London, or South Virginia, Company, which effected the first permanent English settlement—at Jamestown, in 1606.
His great work of The Principal Navigations was in preparation while Raleigh’s projects were under way. Its scheme was drawn at the outset with remarkable breadth and on a lofty scale. While in Stafford’s service at Paris he tells us, “I both heard in speech and read in books, other nations miraculously extolled for their discoveries and notable enterprises by sea, but the English of all others, for their sluggish security, and continual neglect of the like attempts ... either ignominiously reported or exceedingly condemned [? condensed].... Thus both hearing and reading the obliquy of our nation, and finding few or none of our own men able to reply herein; and further, not seeing any man to have care to recommend to the world the industrious labours and painful travels of our countrymen; for stopping the mouths of reproachers, myself ... determined, notwithstanding all difficulties, to undertake the burden of that work wherein all others pretended either ignorance or lack of leisure, or want of sufficient argument, whereas (to speak truly) the huge toil and the small profit to ensue, were the chief causes of the refusal.”
In the laborious collection of his material, much “dispersed, scattered, and hidden in several hucksters’ hands,” as he says, he sought the assistance of the foremost scholars, bibliographers, and writers, and cultivated the acquaintance of all classes of men who could give him information. He tells of talking with Don Antonio, the Portuguese Pretender, when in Paris, and with several of Antonio’s “best captains and pilots, one of whom was born in the East Indies.” He became friendly with travelled French sailors. One of them gave him a piece of supposed silver ore, and showed him “beasts’ skins draped and painted by Indians.” Another exhibited “a piece of the tree called Sassafras brought from Florida, and expounded its high medical virtues,” which afterward was much sought by voyagers to America. He browsed in the king’s library at Paris. He established friendly relations with foreign cosmographers and exchanged letters with them and with other foreign scholars. In London he found and copied rare manuscripts in Lord Lumley’s “stately library”; had access to the queen’s privy gallery at Westminster; and to a rich cabinet of curiosities brought home by travellers. He sought English sea-captains upon their return to port and had informing interviews with them about their adventures. Some brought him tales from Spain about the natives of Florida. Once he travelled two hundred miles on horseback to interview one Thomas Butts, then the only survivor of a disastrous English voyage to Newfoundland in 1536.
The initial volume was completed after his final return to England at the end of his term with the French embassy. Its publication was a distinct event in English letters. The lofty motives that impelled him to the production of the enlarged edition in three volumes he details in his picturesquely phrased “Epistle Dedicatorie” to Lord Charles Howard, prefixed to volume one.
“Right Honourable and my very good Lord,” he here writes, “after I had long since published in Print many Navigations and Discoveries of Strangers in divers languages, as well here at London as in the city of Paris during my five years abode in France with the worthy knight, Sir Edward Stafford, your brother-in-law, his Majesty’s most prudent and careful ambassador ligier with the French king; and had waded on still further and further in the sweet study of the history of Cosmography, I began at length to conceive that with diligent observation, something might be gathered which might commend our nation for their high courage and singular activity in the search and discovery of the most unknown quarters of the world.... The ardent love of my country devoured all difficulties, and, as it were, with a sharp goad provoked me and thrust me forward into this troublesome and painful action. And after great charges and infinite cares, after many watchings, toils, and travels, and wearying out of my weak body, at length I have collected three several volumes of the English Navigations, Traffics, and Discoveries to strange, remote, and far distant countries. Which work of mine I have not included with the compass of things duly done in these later days, as though little or nothing worthy of memory had been performed in former ages, but mounting aloft by the space of many hundred years, have brought to light many very rare and worthy monuments which long have lain miserably scattered in musty corners and wretchedly hidden in misty darkness, and were very like for the greatest part to have been buried in perpetual oblivion.”
In his Preface to the same volume, addressed to the “Friendly Reader,” he further emphasizes this point with the quaintly fashioned statement that in bringing these “antiquities smothered and buried in dark silence” to light, he has incorporated “into one body the torn and scattered limbs of our ancient and late navigations by sea, our voyages by land, and traffic of merchandise by both,” and restored “each particular member being before displaced, to their true joints and ligaments.” In other words, by the help of geography and chronology, which he terms “the Sun and the Moon, the right eye and the left of all history,” he has “referred each particular relation to the due time and space.” He narrates again in this Preface the toils that have been involved in bringing his work into this “homely and rough-hewn shape.” “What restless nights,” he exclaims, “what painful days, what heat, what cold I have endured; how many long and chargeable journeys I travelled: how many famous libraries I have searched into; what variety of ancient and modern writers I have perused; what a number of old records, patents, privileges, letters, etc., I have redeemed from obscurity and perishing; into how manifold acquaintance I have entered; what expenses I have not spared; and yet what fair opportunities of private gain, preferment, and ease I have neglected!” Yet, “howbeit, the honour and benefit of this commonweal wherein I live and breathe, hath made all difficulties seem easy, all pains and industry pleasant, and all expenses of light value and moment unto me.”
Here speaks the true scholar and the genuine patriot.
In 1585, while he was yet in France, ecclesiastical preferment came to Hakluyt, the reversion of the next prebendal stall that should become vacant being that year secured to him by Queen Elizabeth’s mandate; and the following year, upon the death of its incumbent, he took possession of the first stall in the cathedral of Bristol, although he did not give up his chaplaincy at the British embassy and finally return to England till 1588. In the spring of 1590 he was instituted to the rectory of Wetteringsett cum Blochford, in the county of Suffolk. In 1602 he became prebendary of Westminster. In 1612 he obtained the rectory of Gedney in Lincolnshire. He married about the year 1594, when occupying the Wetteringsett rectory.