Hakluyt, Richard - W. Nelson Francis (essay date 1955)
W. Nelson Francis (essay date 1955)
SOURCE: "Hakluyt's Voyages: An Epic of Discovery," in The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, Vol. XII, No. 3, July, 1955, pp. 447-55.
[In the following essay, Francis notes the commercial and patriotic origins of English seafaring in the late sixteenth century. Providing a brief sketch of a typical voyage from The Principal Voyages, Francis praises Hakluyt's restrained editorial style and his industrious scholarship.]
In an age when tales of strange voyages are reasserting their age-old fascination, when any strange craft from Heyerdahl's primitive balsa raft to Beebe's super-scientific bathysphere is almost sure to produce a best seller, an older classic of the literature of discovery deserves to be known. I call it an epic, though it was not primarily intended as a work of literature at all; most of its many authors were blunt men of action, to whom the pen was an unwieldy...
[The entire page is 3808 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
