Contributions
A clergyman educated at Oxford, Richard Hakluyt devoted his life to a single passion: gathering, translating and publishing the accounts of English voyages and discoveries, to feed his country's maritime ambition. He began in 1582 with "Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America," then wrote in 1584, at Walter Ralegh's request, a "Discourse Concerning Western Planting," a confidential memorandum to the queen justifying the colonisation of North America. His masterwork is "The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation" (1589), a vast compilation he enlarged between 1598 and 1600 into three monumental volumes. In it he collected logbooks, letters and the relations of merchants and captains, many of which would otherwise have been lost. An adviser to the trading companies and to the Virginia Company, he placed his geographical learning at the service of colonial enterprise. Prebendary and then archdeacon of Westminster, he died in 1616 and was buried in the Abbey.
Significance
Hakluyt is the great archivist of the English maritime epic, the man who turned a scattering of stray accounts into a national memory and a programme for the future. His audacity was not the navigator's but the visionary propagandist's: convinced that England had an oceanic destiny, he used pen and erudition to persuade sovereigns, merchants and adventurers to look west. By saving the testimony of hundreds of voyages from oblivion, he gave his country the documentary foundation of its future expansion and gave historians an irreplaceable source on the beginnings of globalisation. His "Discourse Concerning Western Planting," long kept secret, is one of the first reasoned manifestos of the English colonisation of America. The shadow in his work lies precisely there: behind the scholar hides an ideologue of empire, who saw in the conquest of distant lands a commercial, religious and strategic interest, without weighing the fate of the peoples it would overturn. Still, without Hakluyt an immense part of the adventure of the English discoverers would be unknown to us today. The Hakluyt Society, founded in the nineteenth century and still active, carries on his name and his mission.
Influence
He shaped the maritime and colonial imagination of England, inspiring the trading companies and the founders of Virginia. His collection became the reference source on English voyages, and his name survives in the Hakluyt Society, which still publishes historic travel accounts; historians of navigation owe him an irreplaceable record. Awakened to geography, by his own account, by the sight of maps and an atlas at a lawyer cousin's, Hakluyt was formed at Oxford and drew on the great cosmographers of the Renaissance, continental and English; the circle of Walter Ralegh and the merchant milieus of London directed his commitment to colonial expansion.
Anecdote
Hakluyt himself placed the birth of his vocation in a precise childhood scene. Visiting an older cousin, a lawyer in London, he glimpsed on a table books of cosmography and an open atlas; the cousin showed him the oceans, kingdoms and trade routes of the world, then read him a verse from the Psalms about those who "go down to the sea in ships." Moved by the lesson, the young boy resolved, he says, to devote his life to this "knowledge of the literature of voyages." From that conversation grew the work of a lifetime.