The Boy's Hakluyt English Voyages of Adventure and Discovery

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QUEEN ELIZABETH GOING ABOARD THE “GOLDEN HIND.”
From a painting by Frank Brangwyn.

This account of Richard Hakluyt and his narratives ofEnglish exploration and adventure, from the earliest recordsto the establishment of the English colonies in North America,has been prepared at the instance of Edwin D. Mead, the finemainspring of the far-reaching system of historical study widelyknown as the “Old South Work,” for the instruction of youngfolk, by engaging methods, in genuine American history. Thepurpose of the book was to draw the youth of to-day to asource of American history of first importance, and a work ofeternal interest and value.

To this end I have sought to utilize the huge foolscapvolumes of the Principal Navigations and to summarize orcompress the narratives into a coherent story from the earliestadventures chiefly for conquest to those for discovery and expansionof trade, and finally for colonization, down to the settlementof Virginia. The American note is dominant throughoutthis animated story of daring, pluck, courage, genuineheroism, and splendid nerve displayed by the English captainsof adventure and discovery North, East, and West.

I have endeavored also to recall Hakluyt’s significant workin his publications which preceded the Principal Navigations,and in his equally important personal efforts to forward Americancolonization by England, in order to re-present him in histrue position, recognized by the earlier historians—that of avifounder hand in hand with Raleigh of the English colonies,out of which developed the national life of the United States.

The dictum of William Robertson in his eighteenth centuryHistory of America (1777), that to Hakluyt England was moreindebted for her American possessions “than to any other manof that age,” was sustained by Sir Clements Robert Markham,the English traveller, geographer, and historian, upon the occasion,in 1896, of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of theHakluyt Society, of which Sir Clements was then the president,when he said: “Virtually Raleigh and Hakluyt were the foundersof those colonies which eventually formed the United States.As Americans revere the name of Walter Raleigh, they shouldgive an equal place to Richard Hakluyt.”

Sir Clements further observed: “Excepting, of course,Shakspere and the Dii Majores, there is no man of the age ofElizabeth to whom posterity owes a deeper debt of gratitudethan to Richard Hakluyt, the saviour of the records of ourexplorers and discoverers by land and sea.”

Americans may well claim the pride of inheritance in thesebrave annals of adventure on untried seas and to unknownlands. Hakluyt’s quaint language ought not to be a hard nutto crack for the American boy when such rich meat is within.