Geographer, linguist, historian, Richard Hakluyt was also Archdeacon of Westminster, diplomat, and busy advocate of Elizabethan sea-power, overseas trade, colonial enterprise. Often considered chiefly as a maritime narrative … [Hakluyt's Voyages] is an anthology of both land and sea travels, from eye-witnesses of most varied classes, ranks, occupations, involving Raleigh (as author), Humphrey Gilbert, Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake, and other names lesser but scarcely ignoble. Heroes, rakes, profiteers, zealots, desperadoes, all were space-invaders and, encountering so many strange peoples in different cultural stratas, they were also time-travellers. Their assignments ring like antique gongs: Muscovy, Cathay, Bohara, Ormuz, Kazan, Astrakhan, Alexandria. They describe Persia, Goa, Venice, Jerusalem, India, penetrate Newfoundland, venture the Straits of Magellan and dare the Horn. Gilbert, significantly, spent two years preparing an expedition to find the North West Passage, yet failed, fatally.

The missives are primarily business reports involving the prospects of exchanging cloth, ornaments, general goods, for silks, jewels, spices, gold, together with reports of native conditions and Spanish hostility. But they are also sustained adventure tales with prodigious wealth of detail, bizarre, unexpected, horrifying or severely factual, inducing a vivid sense of small, precarious vessels and caravans daring, with so much temerity, uncharted hazards—whirlpools, rocks, tempest, disease, cannibals, lice as big as beans, arbitrary fines, imprisonment, torture by capricious rulers, Moslem or pagan, and their extortionate officials: condemnation to galleys, mines, the stake, and circumcision.

Famished sailors ate each other in Newfoundland, and, at sea plotted mutiny, or were agonized into respectful protest. "We have thought good to show unto you, being our Master, our whole minds and griefs in writing." But Raleigh himself cannot resist marvellous digressions, "though impertinent in some sort to my purpose", fascinated by reports of warlike Amazons at Tobago, men with eyes in their shoulders and mouths in their breasts, and an Arawakan drink powdered with the bones of great lords. Such incidentals have won many readers. "Babylon is from hence fifteen days' journey, whereas by true report be great store of dates." Carious human touches abound. "We had aboard us a French-man, a trumpeteer, who, being sick and lying on his bed, took his trumpet notwithstanding, and sounded till he could sound no more, and so died." Then, "Divers women have such exceeding long breasts that some of them will lay the same upon the ground and lie down by them."

In Florida, a Frenchman saw a snake with three heads and four feet, unicorns fought lions, and, more plausibly, "a friar, who, taking upon him to persuade the people to subjection, was by them taken, and his skin cruelly pulled over his ears, and his flesh eaten." Samoyed cannibals revered swordswallowing shamans. Ivan the Terrible's courtiers lengthened their hair when out of favour, his singers "delighted our ears little or nothing," and, from future husbands, his female subjects received love-tokens that included a whip for their own chastisement. We glimpse Ivan, the Great Mogul Akbar, the Inquisition terrorizing gentle Mexicans, Russian Lenten insobrieties and the exchange of dyed Easter eggs, Biman women doing the hard outdoor work and the men keeping house: fine town planning at Pegu whose inhabitants blackened their teeth to distinguish them from dogs.

Tartars used hawks to slay wild horses. "Art or science have they none, but live most idly, sitting round in great companies in the fields, devising and talking most vainly." Venetian women wore shoes "very nearly half a yard from the ground." Cambaians kept hospitals for lame dogs, cats, birds, and fed ants with meat. Royal Javanese wives when widowed were expected to undergo mass-suicide. Ralph Fitch had recognizable English disdain for an Indian prophet: "They took him for a holy man, but sure he was a lazy lubber." There are fearful accounts of storm, shipwreck, abstruse deaths, usually with notable absence of whining and self-pity, more often a stoic acceptance, or even rejoicing, concerning the inevitability and wisdom of God's purposes.

All this confirms Virginia Woolf's verdict on Hakluyt's collections: "Part of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not so much a book as a great bundle of commodities loosely lied together, an emporium, a lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete naval instruments, huge bales of wool and little bags of rubies and emeralds."

Yet there are sober matters of history and anthropology quite outside the lumber room. Robert Gainish, a sea-captain, reports satyrs and headless men, but quotes Pliny, Aristotle, Josephus, Philostratus, Gemma Frisius, Soline, Diodurus Siculus, an interesting comment on Tudor education. Contacts with indigenous peoples suggest less innate violence than general greed and fear, by no means obsolete. Hawkins used the Jesus as a slaver! Spanish cruelty, prolonged and systematic, still astonishes and perturbs; like the Nazis in Russia, Philip's men forfeited much initia, goodwill by mass-extermination and bigotry. There emerges an accusing sense of missed opportunities. Europeans might have harmonized huge territories had their projects been less impelled by nationalism and religion, sometimes more intolerable even than the extremes of private profit. Inescapable is the universal relativity of religions, political notions, morals, values. The ubiquitous nakedness seldom seems erotic to these Elizabethan explorers, merely fellow humans seen in perspective, like the cow described by a modern child as "an animal with legs all the way down to the ground." There was not only savagery but aimiable curiosity and resonably honest bargaining.

Virginia Woolf disliked the effect of these exotic discoveries on English prose style, but, here at least, the style is remarkably even: plain, without the extravagances of many coeval poets, critics, literary men. It is surely part of a prose tradition direct, sometimes moralizing and sententious but usually precise and hardhitting, stretching from King Alfred through Bunyan, Defoe, Cobbett, to Russell, Priestley, Orwell.