Hakluyt, Richard | James A. Williamson (essay date 1928)
James A. Williamson (essay date 1928)
SOURCE: An introduction to Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, by George Bruner Parks, edited by James A. Williamson, American Geographical Society, 1928, pp. xi-xvii.
[In the following excerpt, Williamson places Hakluyt's English Voyages in a historical context. Williamson considers Hakluyt the major historian of Elizabethan colonial expansion, and finds in his work crucial evidence of the "ideas and outlook of the Elizabethans. "]
The Elizabethan age was not spacious, as we are sometimes told, but narrow and needy. It was a time of industrious study of man and nature as well as of books, and its adventures were undertaken not from swashbuckling zest but because good men found their country in a tight place and staked their lives and fortunes to redeem it. It was a time of more loss than profit, of more misery than glory. Drake's record has deceived many; he was an exception, not a type....
[The entire page is 2859 words long]
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