‘I by experience’—that is the very voice of Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ its unique and authentic value, the quality which makes it no book but a living document of the English people. In his labour to make it that Hakluyt drew to himself all he needed, from the humble and from the great. He tells us how many ‘virtuous gentlemen’ helped him, and gives us a galaxy of great Elizabethan names—Sir John Hawkins (who knew something of ‘sea-sorrows,’ for when he returned from his West Indies voyage he said to Walsingham, ‘If I should write of all our calamities I am sure a volume as great as the Bible will scarce suffice’), Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Walsingham, Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord Treasurer Burghley, Sir Robert Cecil, foreign cosmographers and scholars like Mercator, Ortelius, and Thevet, were his friends and correspondents. He valued them all, and not less did he value each humble sailor he came across, such as Mr. Jennings and Mr. Smith, ‘the master and master’s mate of the ship called the Toby, belonging to Bristol,’ or a nameless seaman, ‘One of mine acquaintance of Ratcliffe.’ He travelled two hundred miles on horseback to speak with one Thomas Buts, the sole survivor of a Labrador voyage. From the lips of all he learned, and nothing was insignificant to him if it bore upon the sea or far countries or the restless adventures and heroisms of the men of his race. It is the story of the travels of individual men, he truly says, which brings us to a full knowledge of the world, ‘not those weary volumes bearing the titles of Universal Cosmography, which some men that I could name have published as their own.’ It came too late for inclusion in his book; but how he would appreciate the saying of Sir Henry Middleton when the Red Sea was ‘discovered’ (a hundred years after the Portuguese discovered it), and the Turks claimed it as a close sea. ‘To come into this sea,’ Middleton answered splendidly, ‘I needed no leave but God’s and my King’s,’ and followed up his answer with cannon shot. Hakluyt, like most passionate pioneers of Empire, lacked the humour that was Shakespeare’s: ‘Master,’ says one of the fishermen in Pericles, ‘I marvel how the fishes live in the sea,’ and was answered: ‘Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.’ The gravity of a great purpose is seldom seasoned with humour, and more to Hakluyt’s liking than Shakespeare’s jest would have been the thought of Samuel Daniel:
‘And who, in time, knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue? to what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?’
He was filled with a spacious philanthropy to the unknown world, and would bestow on it the benefits of our tongue and our laws. His gentleness and wisdom did not fail him even on the thorny question of the propagation of the Christian religion among the ‘salvages’ of the Indies:
‘The means,’ he says, ‘to send such as shall labour effectually in this business is, by planting one or two colonies of our nation upon that firm [mainland] where they may remain in safety and first learn the language of the people near adjoining (the gift of tongues being now taken away) and by little and little acquaint themselves with their manners, and so with discretion and mildness distill into their purged minds the sweet and lively liquor of the gospel.’
His sagacity and good judgment is shown by the way in which he dealt with and arranged the enormous mass of material he accumulated. The wild and fantastic methods of some Elizabethan historians were not to his mind: he launched not out into a Universal History of the World on Ralegh’s plan, and by his very restraint and the value of his material produced a book which will live as long as the English language, while Ralegh’s ambitious effort has gone to dust, which weighs light in the balance compared with the jewelled lines of his lyric, ‘If all the world and love were young.’ Hakluyt shirks none of the pedestrian necessities of his task: he carefully records the name of the historian of each voyage, as well as the name of the voyager, so that every man may ‘answer for himself, justify his reports, and stand accountable for his own doings.’ Moreover, he exercises a stern supervision over the superfluous—a necessity if he was to get as many voyages and as much information as possible into the compass of his volumes, for as Professor Walter Raleigh says in his inspiring Introductory Essay to Maclehose’s edition of Hakluyt, ‘It was the habit of his age to begin even a nautical diary with a few remarks on the origin of the world, the history of man, and the opinions of Plato.’ Delightful though such remarks would now be to the student of Elizabethan literature, Hakluyt had little use for them. He had a stern, a great, and a practical intent in compiling his ‘Principal Navigations,’ and a far better thing to him than literary graces would be the knowledge that the profits of the East India Company were increased by £20,000 through the study of his book. He classified and arranged his voyages in three series: first the voyages to the South and South-East; then the North-Eastern voyages; and last the voyages to the West, ‘those rare, delightfull and profitable histories,’ and ‘the beginnings and proceeding of the two English Colonies planted in Virginia,’ of which Ralegh said, ‘I shall yet live to see it an English nation.’
Such, in rough outline, is that great work of his, which perhaps might justly represent us to the world, with the Plays of Shakespeare, in the two aspects of which we are most proud, our seamanship and our poetry, were two books only to be taken from our literature. Shakespeare and Hakluyt, who by a singular coincidence both died in the same year, make together an epitome of the English people. In a large number of cases they share the fate of classics, especially classics on the great scale, and are ‘taken as read.’ But no matter: their thought and their passion, different though they are in degree, have permeated the very marrow of our minds, we absorb them unconsciously simply because we are English. The most unlettered seaman is a ‘pilgrim’ of Hakluyt’s and an embodiment of his hopes; the most casual or most glorious Englishman is a type of Shakespeare’s, and to be found in that ‘universal gallery’ of his plays. In Hakluyt we enjoy the English combination of the poetic and the practical, and delight in his shrewdness and his pure enthusiasm.