In the following chapters we shall see how Raleigh's brave words came true.
CHAPTER II.
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING.
Sixteenth century maps.
In all the history of human knowledge there is no more fascinating chapter than that which deals with the gradual expansion of men's geographical ideas consequent upon the great voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is not a tale so written that he who runs may read it, but its events have rather to be slowly deciphered from hundreds of quaint old maps, whereon islands and continents, mountains and rivers, are delineated with very slight resemblance to what we now know to be the reality; where, for instance, Gog and Magog show a strong tendency to get mixed up with Memphremagog, where the capital of China stands a few hundred miles north of the city of Mexico, and your eye falls upon a river which you feel sure is the St. Lawrence until you learn that it is meant for the Yang-tse-Kiang. In the sixteenth century scarcely any intellectual stimulus could be found more potent than the sight of such maps, revealing unknown lands, or cities and rivers with strange names, places of which many marvels had been recounted and almost anything might be believed.
Richard Hakluyt.
One afternoon in the year 1568, the lawyer Richard Hakluyt was sitting at his desk in the Middle Temple, with a number of such maps and sundry new books of cosmography spread out before him, when the door opened and his young cousin and namesake, then a boy of sixteen studying at Westminster School, came into the room. The elder Richard opened the Bible at the 107th Psalm, and pointed to the verses which declare that "they which go downe to the sea in ships and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep;" then he called the lad's attention to the maps, in which he soon became absorbed. This incident determined the career of the younger Richard Hakluyt, and led to his playing an important part in the beginnings of the United States of America. A learned and sagacious writer upon American history, Mr. Doyle, of All Souls College, Oxford, has truly said that it is "hard to estimate at its full value the debt which succeeding generations owe to Richard Hakluyt."[20] In 1570 he became a student at Christ Church, Oxford, and took his master's degree in 1577. His book called "Divers Voyages," dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, was published in 1582. From 1583 to 1588 he was chaplain of the English legation at Paris, and before his return he was appointed canon of Bristol, an office which he held till 1605. Thus for many years he lived in the city of the Cabots, the cradle of the new era of maritime adventure. He came to be recognized as one of the foremost geographers of the age and the greatest living English authority on matters relating to the New World. The year following the defeat of the Armada witnessed the publication of his book entitled "Principal Voyages," which Froude well calls "the prose epic of the modern English nation."[21] In 1605 he was made a prebendary of Westminster, and eleven years later was buried with distinguished honours beneath the pavement of the great Abbey.
Adventures of a manuscript.