and he desired, as might be expected from his thoroughness, not only to write of those things, but to experience them. He planned to accompany Drake’s West Indies voyage of 1585, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s fatal one in 1583, but happily some unknown cause prevented his embarking with Gilbert. England could ill have spared him with his great task unaccomplished.
In 1589, the year after the defeat of the Armada, the fruit of his labours appeared in the first edition in one folio volume of ‘The Principal Navigations.’ After another ten years of labour the second and final edition in three folio volumes was published in 1598-1600. When that work appeared he might justly have said with Drake, ‘I am the man I have promised to be.’ He had accomplished the toil he had set himself, and doing so produced a work which is nearer being the epic of the English people than any other book we have. Every activity of his busy life was made to serve that central purpose. He went abroad, he lived for five years in France as chaplain to Queen Elizabeth’s Ambassador; he gained ecclesiastical preferment, becoming prebendary of Bristol, rector of Wetheringsett in Suffolk, archdeacon of Westminster, and Chaplain of the Savoy. He married, he had a son—but all these things are shadowy to us: Hakluyt is the chronicler of the ‘Voyages,’ the mouthpiece of Elizabethan England at sea, and as such he would wish that we remembered him. Drayton showed the responsiveness of his contemporaries when he sang:
‘Thy voyages attend
Industrious Hackluit,
Whose reading shall inflame
Men to seek fame
And much commend
To after times thy wit.’
We do not feel that Hakluyt cared greatly about commending to after times his wit, but that his book should inflame ‘men to seek fame’ was its very object and purpose. He lived in the age of exploration and great attempts; Englishmen were just fully awakening to their heritage, and determined no longer to be forestalled by the Spaniards and Portuguese in the adventure of the globe. The regions left them to explore were more dangerous and difficult than what Hakluyt calls ‘the mild, lightsome, temperate, and warm Atlantic Ocean, over which the Spaniards and Portugals have made so many pleasant, prosperous and golden voyages.’ But from the rigours of harsh latitudes they won their fame and their hardihood. We love Hakluyt’s gorgeous Elizabethan pride when he speaks favourably of the Northern voyages of the Dutch, but ‘with this proviso; that our English nation led them the dance, brake the yce before them, and gave them good leave to light their candle at our torch.’
What a father he was to his seamen, how he rejoiced in their triumphs, sympathised in their affections, and understood their ‘sea-sorrows’! Many and bitter are those sorrows, as recorded in his ‘Voyages,’ and the men of that day, many of whom had known the savageries of Spain, and all of whom had lived through the coming of the ‘Invincible Armada,’ would thrill to the grand Biblical opening of that poignant narrative of John Hartop, ‘Man being born of a Woman, living a short time is replenished with many miseries, which some know by reading of histories, many by the view of others’ calamities, and I by experience.’