“Surely if there were in vs that desire to aduaunce the honour of our countrie which ought to bee in euery good man, wee woulde not all this while haue foreslowne [forborne] the possessing of those landes whiche of equitie and right appertaine vnto vs, as by the discourses that followe shall appeare more plainely.”
With these preliminaries the compiler first proceeded alluringly to exhibit “testimonies” of the Cabot discoveries of the mainland of North America for England a year before Columbus had sighted the continent.
This evidence comprised the letters-patent of King Henry the seventh issued to John Cabot and his three sons, Lewis, Sebastian, and Santius, authorizing the exploration of new and unknown regions, under date of the fifth of March, 1495/6, distinguished in American history as “the most ancient American state paper of England”; a “Note of Sebastian Gabotes voyage of Discouerie taken out of an old Chronicle written by Robert Fabian, sometime alderman of London”; a memorandum of “three sauage men which hee brought home and presented vnto the King”; and another reference to the Cabot voyages made by the Venetian historian, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, in the preface to one of his volumes of voyages and travels published in 1550–1563. Next followed, in the order named, a “Declaration” by Robert Thorne, a London merchant long resident in Seville, Spain, setting forth the discoveries made in the Indies for Portugal, and demonstrating to Henry the eighth of England that the northern parts of America remained for him to “take in hande,” which he failed to do; a “Booke” by Thorne, still in Seville, later prepared, in 1527, at the request of the British ambassador in Spain, being an “Information” on the same subject; the “Relation” of John Verazzano, the Florentine corsair, in the service of France, describing his voyage of discovery, made in 1524, along the eastern coast of America from about the present South Carolina to Newfoundland; an account of the discovery of Greenland and various phantom islands, with the coast of North America, by the brothers Zeno, Venetian navigators, in the late fourteenth century; and a report of the “true and last” discovery of Florida made by Captain John Ribault for France, in 1562.
The pamphlet closed with a chapter of practical instructions for intending colonists and an inviting list of commodities growing “in part of America not presently inhabited by any Christian from Florida northward.”
Its publication was a revelation to the English public. Before it appeared the people in general of that day had little knowledge of the accomplishments of either their own or foreign voyagers in discovery and for commercial advantage. Merchants engaged in foreign trade or ventures—and adventurous mariners, to be sure—kept themselves informed on what was going on and had gone on. But the information they collected was exclusively for the purposes of their own traffic. They were not interested in making it public. The real object, too, of many expeditions professing to aim at higher purposes, was, as John Winter Jones points out in his Introduction to the modern reprint of Divers Voyages, a gold-mine, or a treasure-laden galleon on the high seas. Hakluyt’s little book immediately gave a fresh turn to public interest. Its practical effect was the speedy forwarding of the expedition of Sir Humphrey Gilbert in the summer of 1583, the first of the English nation to carry people directly to erect a colony in the north countries of America. This was an unsuccessful attempt at an establishment at Newfoundland, and was followed by the loss of Sir Humphrey with the foundering of his cockle-shell of a ship on the return voyage.
Two years after the appearance of Divers Voyages a second work came from the same hand for the same general object.
This was a work of broader scope and of larger significance. It was prepared not for the press but for private and confidential circulation. It was, in effect, a state paper, marshalling arguments in behalf of a specific policy, and was intended expressly for the eye of queen Elizabeth, and her principal advisers. It exhibited the political, commercial, and religious advantages to be derived by England from American colonization at a critical juncture of affairs. The Catholic Philip the second of Spain was now aiming at the “suppression of heretics throughout the world,” and Elizabeth of England was his main object of insidious attack as “the principal of the princes of the reformed religion.” The particular purpose of the work was to enlist the throne in the large projects formed by Walter Raleigh in continuation of the scheme of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (Raleigh’s half-brother) after the lamentable fate of that chivalrous gentleman.
Only three or four copies of this paper are supposed to have been made. Its existence was unknown to the historians for more than two and a half centuries. The credit for bringing it to public light and for its reproduction in print was due to American bibliophiles and scholars.
The discovery of it came about in this wise. In the eighteen fifties a copy of a “Hakluyt Manuscript” appeared at an auction sale of a famous private library in London, and was bought by a shrewd and indefatigable collector of rare Americana, Henry Stevens of Vermont, at that time resident in London. On a blank leaf of the manuscript the purchaser found this pencilled memorandum, evidently made by the owner of the library, Lord Valentia:
“This unpublished Manuscript of Hakluyt is extremely rare. I procured it from the family of Sir Peter Thomson. The editors of the last edition [meaning the collection of Hakluyt’s works published in 1809–1812] would have given any money for it had it been known to have existed.”