This is an extract from a longer work entitled [Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English nation], which was a collection of documents made in the sixteenth century by Richard Hakluyt: a man whose gratuitous pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was to him life’s most important end. This penguin edition is about one tenth of the whole collection. He could lay claim to be Englands first geographer. The authors of these documents were mostly hard headed practical men who were a distinctive break from the tradition of renaissance cosmology writing weighed down by references to classical texts.

England in the late sixteenth century lagged behind other European powers in exploration and colonisation of the rest of the world. The Portuguese were the leaders in Exploration, the Spanish controlled much of the shipping routes to South America in their search for gold and precious stones, while the French were already establishing colonies on the continent of North America. The English were late to the party, but were determined to grab something for themselves and so a mixture of a genuine desire to establish trade and business relations sat uneasily with a need to indulge in piracy on the high seas. The documents detail the voyages of traders and pirates desperate not to lose out on the riches of exotic goods, slavery, and precious metals. There is very little in the way of new discoveries, these seamen were largely going where others had gone before.

From the documents collected here it would seem that England had three options: one was to find the mythical North West passage, the sea route that would link the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean through the North American land mass. The other was to approach the exotic east of China and Japan through a sort of North East passage that took traders through the Caspian sea into Russia and on through Persia. The final option was to muscle in on the lucrative slave and mineral trade already established by the Spanish, French and Portuguese; taking in Africa and the Americas. The documents (there are 76) which were written by those who had first hand knowledge of the voyages are of course a mixed bag: containing practical accounts by traders such as Anthony Jenkins of a voyage to the city of Bokhara in Bactria in 1558, to a letter in verse written by the poet George Tuberville out of Moscovy in 1568 and finally the very eloquent account by Sir Walter Raleigh of the beautiful Empire of Guiana and the search for the Spanish Eldorado.

This is an extract from George Turbeville’s letter in verse concerning the Russians:

A people passing rude, to vices vile inclined,
Folk fit to be of Bacchus trained, so quaffing is their kind.
Drink is their whole desire, the pot is all their pride,
The soberest head doth once a day stand needful of a guide….
The house that hath no god, or painted saint within,
Is not to be resorted to, that the roof is full of sin.

Many of these despatches from Russia talk of traders being well received in Moscow and then taking the Volga river down to Astrakhan on the Caspian sea, where the travelling gets more difficult and finally into Persia where it is bandit country. The would be traders and business men arm themselves to fight their way from one caravanserai to another in a search for exotic goods from the east.

The search for the North West passage claimed many lives: Martin Frobisher undertook more than one voyage in artic conditions as did John Davis and their accounts of their battles with ice and extreme weather would make most people think twice about attempting the voyage. The details of the voyages are probably taken from the ships log; in Frobisher’s case they were written by somebody on board his ship, but it would appear that John Davis wrote his own account in the first person.

The first document that contains details of the English acting as slave traders and pirates is “The voyage made by Mr John Hawkins to the coast of Guinea and the Indies of Nova Hispania 1564” The casual business of buying negro slaves from the Portuguese colonists makes horrific reading today as does the pillaging and burning of settlements. From the African coast Hawkins and his ships voyaged to the West Indies where they did business with the Spaniards, always ready to use force where necessary and then onto French settlements on the Florida coast. There follows a discourse by Miles Philips (Englishman) who was put on shore in the West Indies by John Hawkins when an expedition was dangerously low on food; half the ships company were left with a promise that they would be picked up next year. Miles Philips was one of the few survivors finally getting back to England 16 years later.

The documents are arranged in date order and over half of the book deals with expeditions from 1580 to 1596. Sir Francis Drake, Thomas Cavendish voyaged around the world pirating and plundering as they went, while England was officially and unofficially at war with Spain. Amongst the pirating and plundering other voyages are described including one for the relief of colonists in Virginia, who are castigated by a representative of Sir Walter Raleigh for their bad treatment of the Indian natives. There is a report on the defeat of the Spanish armada and the mystery of the colonists at Roanoak.

If these documents demonstrate anything it is the English captains desire to do business, whether that is by making trading agreements, finding new routes or plundering the ships of other nations. There was an appalling loss of life amongst the ordinary seamen, through starvation, disease, hypothermia, or in skirmishes, some of which is recorded in grim details in these despatches. There are a few documents that seem little more than travellers tales, but mostly they are realistic with some communicating a tremendous sense of adventure and hardship. The penguin edition has some useful biographical notes of the major characters as well as some brief notes on the text. The sentences and word order of Hakluyt’s original edition has been largely unaltered, but the spelling has been modernised. There are no maps or bibliography and so it is useful to have access to more information while reading. This book serves as an excellent introduction for the interested reader and so 4 stars. ( )

I own a complete edition published in the early 1900s. This is absolutely invaluable for anyone interested in the voyages of discovery. ( )

I own a complete edition published in the early 1900s. This is absolutely invaluable for anyone interested in the voyages of discovery. ( )