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. He was supremely fortunate, but few of those who followed him came home rich; most of them left their bones in the tropics. Sir Humphrey Gilbert did hard and varied service and made nothing by it. Sir John Hawkins deserves to live less for his slaving than for his prosaic battle with corruption in the Navy Office. Sir Francis Walsingham, a chronic invalid, toiled for the state, lived frugally, and died in debt. And as a type of the merchant-patriot we may take old Michael Lok, who made a modest fortune in European trade, staked every penny on the Arctic passage to Cathay, was bankrupt and imprisoned, spent his declining years in exile, and is last seen at eighty, still writing and scheming for the discovery which would profit his country but hardly himself. If we probe beneath the incidents and seek out the motives we find no absent-minded empire-building but a reasoned, cooperative effort which left no means untried to attain a definite goal. The way of these men was hard, and their reward small. Posterity can see that they were successful beyond their dreams, but they themselves closed their eyes on failure; the success revealed itself slowly after they were dead. Richard Hakluyt's epic is no paean of victory but a tribute to service and suffering; his heroes are not "glorious" but "worthy." That is the best word he can bestow upon them.

The Elizabethan field has still its harvest to be reaped; and the Hakluyts, as their works are revealed in these pages, may point the way to it. That way is not chiefly to retail exciting incidents, although they have their illustrative uses, but to study history and to think.

From it there emerges the truth about Elizabethan efforts, and much more besides. For the sixteenth century is but the first chapter of the modern drama, itself preceded by a medieval prologue. In four centuries European man has attained to world power, power not only over other races of men but also over seas, deserts, jungles, and mountains, the obstacles of nature which have in previous ages circumscribed the actions of the most gifted peoples. He has not done this by superior intelligence, nor is it at all certain that he owes his success very largely to superior ethics. That and other circumstances are debatable; but at least it is clear that an indispensable factor in the process has been the series of reactions set up by the European world travelers of the sixteenth century. Discovery led to trade and to the plunder of helpless peoples possessed of mineral wealth. Stores of gold, silver, and gems became available as currency; great trading operations concentrated much of this wealth in a few hands; and before the close of that first century there were great capitalists on the Continent and smaller ones in England controlling a fund of fluid wealth ready to be directed to enterprise which promised further advance of the same sort. This prominence of the new kind of wealth was the most significant product of the age of discovery. Wealth in the form of landed estates had been real enough but not available for the promotion of mercantile undertakings; wealth represented by a strong room filled with bullion was a dynamic force, a concentration of power capable of being exerted in any direction.

There followed the seventeenth century, of colonization and the oceanic trading monopolies, systematically designed for the acquisition of more fluid capital. England, France, and Holland challenged and surpassed Portugal and Spain, who had been first in the field but had allowed their methods to become stereotyped and lifeless. Collateral developments aided mercantile efficiency. National law in strongly governed states rendered wealth secure. International law began to take shape and acquire validity. Religious inhibitions on the free use of capital grew obsolete. Joint stock, the sale of shares, insurance, paper substitutes for coin, all invented by medieval Italians for their Mediterranean trade, attained a world-wide vogue. Communication became more rapid, and the multiplication of printed books stored and transmitted a fluid capital of experience comparable to that of gold. The energizing force flowed into ever new veins, industry subdivided and specialized, comfort became more general, and untrammelled thought grew more ingenious in ministering to it. Social Europe in the age of Louis XIV was a different world from the Europe of the Emperor Sigismund and the Hundred Years' War—a tract of prosperity compared with a waste of brutish misery; and the story was yet at its beginning.

In the eighteenth century the colonies grew up and became nations; the thirteen English colonies of America at least did so, whilst those of Spain and Portugal developed in the same direction, and the little nucleus of Frenchmen on the St. Lawrence had multiplied to 70,000 when they came under the British flag. The multiplication of the American stock, even more than its political development, was the outstanding world phenomenon of this century. In 1700 the thirteen colonies contained about 200,000 people; every twenty years or so the numbers doubled; and by 1800 the population of the United States was over 5,000,000. These people were still almost exclusively agricultural. They imported nearly all their cloth, ironware, pottery, and luxury manufactures; and the reaction of this great new market upon the industries of Europe was immense. Central and South America added their demands. The West Indies of England, France, and Spain employed great numbers of slaves, enriched planters and traders, and called in their turn for manufactures in exchange for their products. In the East the process was different, but its effects were the same. Where the seventeenth century had witnessed trading posts in India, the eighteenth saw its conquest and the fuller exploitation of its market for manufactured goods. The Dutch extended their hold upon the islands of Asia, and all the sea powers reached farther still to tap the commerce of China. France, in spite of disastrous wars and more disastrous finance, expanded her trade abroad and her industries at home and, if she had reformed instead of destroying her institutions, might have taken the lead in the industrial transformation that has produced the world of today. That, as it fell out, became the destiny of England. Her ocean trade was as great as that of France; and her home population, which had to feed it, was only one-third as numerous. Thus demand necessitated a new kind of supply, mass production for distant markets, scope for the inventions of an alert people, and the application of a now enormous capital to the new organization.

A hundred years ago the world entered an unprecedented phase. "Modern history" began with the Renaissance; but, unless we are to apply the term to two very dissimilar periods, we must reckon that it ended with Napoleon. The age that then commenced awaits a name, and only its tendencies are as yet discernible; its main characteristics have still, perhaps, to show themselves. In one aspect it is but an intensification of the earlier process; more transoceanic settlement of Europeans, more tropical dependencies, more mass manufacture, more raw materials, much more fluid capital. But in another sense it is different. In the seventeenth century, even in the eighteenth, few men were conscious of change. There was a slow beneficent movement, but environment remained substantially unaltered. In the present period a man who lives out his years is born in one world and dies in another. The old, even the middle-aged, are strangers in an unfamiliar scene. The pace has many times multiplied in proportion to the duration of life, and one of its consequences has been the mental and moral unrest of the modern world. This rapid development is agreed to be, in the main, beneficial. Yet it has disquieting features. The question is not whether the advance of scientific organization is in itself desirable, but whether it may not be outrunning the capacity of man to adapt himself to it. With the statement of the question this survey reaches the limits of history and may fitly be brought to a close.

Such has been the working of the forces brought to birth by those old students, speculators, and men of action of the Renaissance. Apart from its intrinsic interest it calls for study, for it is only by knowing the past and realizing how it has produced the present that we can hope to control our own surroundings. Fertile scholarship is working towards a synthesis soundly based upon a multitude of special studies in which history, geography, and economic science bear the leading parts. That is only a statement of what the Elizabethans aimed at in their attempt to solve the problems of their time….

The history of Elizabethan expansion is to a great extent the work of Richard Hakluyt, to a greater extent perhaps than the record of any other large movement can be ascribed to the labors of any one historian. He preserved a mass of material that would otherwise have perished, and he handled it with an enthusiasm and common sense which have made his work live through the centuries in a manner that its mere content would not have ensured. To appreciate that point we need only compare the collection of Samuel Purchas, similar in topics and greater in bulk, yet dull and repellent to the reader and not exploited even by scholars with the assiduity bestowed upon the English Voyages. Purchas arranged a museum; Hakluyt gathered the materials of a history and dealt so cunningly with them that they became a history whilst retaining their guise of raw materials—a double achievement which no modern editor has had the art to imitate.

The value of the English Voyages to compilers of narrative has long been known. It has perhaps been overestimated, for the riches of the book seem to excuse one for neglecting to look elsewhere. It is too easy to assume that Hakluyt is complete and that further research is needless. That, however, is not true; Hakluyt is no more complete than any contemporary historian can be. Political hindrances, personal jealousies, the reticence of men about their past, an honorable respect for such scruples, some inevitable falsity of perspective have all led to suppressions. The last of these errors is certainly the least conspicuous; in the main, Hakluyt's perspective from the sixteenth century is that which the twentieth century is rediscovering, and conscious omissions form the chief reason why research has need to dig under and around him. The reality of that need requires emphasis, and we may be sure that Hakluyt himself would today be the first to recommend it.

His work, which will be shown to consist of much more than the English Voyages, has another value, which has not been so well understood; it helps to reveal the ideas and outlook of the Elizabethans. The ideas governed the actions and can be understood by reading the textbooks of the time, by studying its propaganda and its personal relationships, and by scrutinizing its deeds before their proper background, the historical and geographical knowledge of their doers. Hakluyt did much to synthetize this knowledge for his own generation; but his contribution and that of others have been too little regarded by later interpreters, with unfortunate results to the presentation of history.

One may in fact be bold to say that the commonly accepted story of Elizabethan expansion is vitiated by false traditions concocted partly by those whose study has been too shallow and still more by those who have viewed too narrow a field. Instead of a reasoned unity we have too often a series of episodes, brilliant but disconnected, annals and not history. The brilliance conceals the defect. The details are so interesting—Drake's plunder, Gilbert's heroism, the flamboyance of Raleigh, the greatest costume actor in any age—that general readers and popular writers have asked for nothing more, have taken for granted that the Elizabethans were romantic and unaccountable, and have forgotten that the actions of large groups of men need a sober explanation and, for the performers, undoubtedly had one. So we have as a usual conception that Drake in his Pacific raid was nothing but a glorious pirate, that Hawkins was a mere slave trader and therefore disreputable, that Raleigh alone begot a colonial empire, that the East India Company was founded because pepper was dear, that the mass of English merchants and seamen were of no importance and need not be mentioned, and that Hakluyt was a literary man fired with romance, whose studies served for delight and nothing more.

Such things, it is true, are not expressly stated in learned works, but they are sometimes implied in them; for the romantic tradition has created such an atmosphere that even those who have read the truth in the records have allowed their vision to be fogged. In more popular writings the error holds full sway, for romance is a better seller than reality; and one-sided books continue to appear, overdrawing first Drake then Raleigh (they are the favorites) and exhibiting the special illusion of biographers, that their hero alone did everything notable in his age. A more general theme is no less constant: that England's greatness was due to persons of poor character, scape-graces and ne'er-do-wells, a reckless, improvident, almost imbecile crew, and that Providence admired their boyish hardihood and brought to nought the subtlety of their rivals. That is a deception arising from an English habit of self-depreciation, first practiced by the Puritans as a pious reaction against the wordly self-confidence of their predecessors and remaining as a permanent strand in the national character. Cromwell, we may remember, going into action at the head of the best-trained army an English field had ever seen, ascribed the victory of "a company of poor ignorant men"—fifty per cent more numerous than their opponents—to divine intervention alone. Modern romancers have seized upon the paradox whilst varying its terms. For the modest Puritan they have substituted the legendary younger son with his company of tatterdemalions, and they have obscured the truth that it was by organization and not improvidence that great leaders accomplished great deeds. A war-drilled generation knows better, but literary convention is apt to lag behind experience.

A different approach discovers a truer story. It is symptomatic of the methods so commonly applied in the past to the study of Elizabethan expansion that the life and work of Richard Hakluyt, the clergyman, and of his cousin, Richard Hakluyt, the lawyer, have never before been fully examined. The record of their careers is barren of adventure and almost of incident and offers no attraction to the romantic biographer. Yet … it is an important record to the historian and one that gives him an established body of contemporary doctrine to which he may relate the diverse undertakings of the time; or, to use a metaphor, provides a backbone to which a dismembered skeleton may be articulated. More than this, it shows the doctrine in course of development, from the medieval ignorance of the age of discovery to the clear-cut aims with which the seventeenth century set forth on its career of oversea construction. In this process the elder Hakluyt (the lawyer) is virtually a newly discovered agent. We have had hitherto a very dim conception of him, but his function as an accumulator and exchanger of information is here established, to the strengthening of the argument that a conscious design inspired the actions of his age. His younger cousin had been more celebrated but always for only a portion of his work, and he too stands forth in a new guise as an unwearied agent in almost all the propaganda of the movement towards expansion. His unselfishness and breadth of mind have hitherto been guessed at rather than fully proved; and the revelation of his often anonymous contributions to the cause, both in labor and in money, places his fame upon a secure foundation….