SOURCE: Helfers, James P. “The Explorer or the Pilgrim? Modern critical opinion and the editorial methods of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas.” Studies in Philology 94, No. 2 (Spring 1997): 160-86.

[In the following essay, Helfers compares Hakluyt and Purchas, their methods, goals, and critics. Helfers concludes that the harshness of modern critical opinion of Purchas is unwarranted.]

Victorian critic J. A. Froude calls Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations¹ “the prose epic of the English Nation.”² On the other hand, G. B. Parks characterizes Samuel Purchas, editor of Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, as a “mere worker in archives” who “arranged a museum,” in contrast with Hakluyt, who “gathered the materials of a history and dealt so cunningly with them that they became a history while retaining the guise of raw materials.”³

These two critical opinions rehearse the relative importance given by modern scholars to the two greatest English Renaissance collections of travel and exploration narratives. Such estimates of relative importance have changed over the years, however. The critics of the eighteenth century thought more of Purchas's collection than they did Hakluyt's.⁴ These changes in critical appraisal have come about in part because of changing attitudes toward the use and purpose of travel narratives. This study will describe the collections and their editors, and sketch modern critical opinion about Hakluyt and Purchas. These critical opinions will be examined in light of the explicit and implicit editorial aims and practices expressed in the two collections. Such an examination, taking the aims of the collections' editors as the philosophical benchmark, will show that most modern critical appraisals have castigated Samuel Purchas because they have not taken into account his expressed editorial aims and the way those aims are played out in his editorial practices.

BACKGROUNDS: HISTORICAL, BIOGRAPHICAL, AND CRITICAL

By the time Hakluyt began his work, the excitement of exploration and discovery had been “in the air” of Western Europe for over a hundred years, since the days of Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal. England had an early opportunity to participate in exploration; Columbus's brother, Bartholomew, had come to Henry VII's court, probably in 1489 to enlist support for his brother's westward venture.⁵ In 1498 the English commissioned John Cabot to make a western voyage of discovery. During this voyage Cabot claimed the eastern coast of Canada for England.

Although English voyages to North America languished for a time after Cabot's pioneering effort, other voyages that mixed trade and exploration went on during the sixteenth century—sea voyages in search of the Northeast Passage (which almost incidentally opened commercial relations with Russia), and overland travels to Persia and points east. English entrepreneurs, beginning in 1562, began to take what would become a major role in the slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean.⁶ Finally, by the last quarter of the sixteenth century, North American exploration began in earnest again with Sir Humphrey Gilbert's colonizing efforts and Martin Frobisher's attempt to find the Northwest Passage. This flurry of exploration at the end of the sixteenth century produced a large amount of ephemeral literature—especially pamphlet accounts of various voyages. The exploring traders and their associates, the economic geographers of the Muscovy Company, produced much material, both published and unpublished, before Hakluyt's collection.

The new practical geography spawned by the European exploratory effort was imported to England by John Leland in 1549 with the publication of his New Year's Gift.⁷ Between 1547 and 1561, a new set of geographers evolved in England, trained first by foreign sources of information and then by domestic ones as England's land and sea expeditions reached out northeast and southeast: Richard Hakluyt the elder (cousin and inspirational model of our editor), a lawyer of the Middle Temple, was one of these commercial geographical consultants to the merchant explorers who dominated England's exploratory ventures during the sixteenth century. These commercial geographical consultants made the first attempts to collect and codify practical foreign geographical information. The older Richard Hakluyt specialized in mercantile information.⁸ Richard Hakluyt the younger was born in 1552, a year before the first Northeast Passage expedition, a year before Richard Eden translated Munster's Treatise of the Newe India (concerning the American discoveries) into English. He was, in fact, the youngest in this line of practical geographers.

Hakluyt's apprenticeship, as it were, in the art of practical geography occurred after his matriculation from Christ Church, Oxford, where he had learned and lectured about geography. In 1582 he published Diverse Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, which collected information in English for a wide audience of his countrymen. Ironically, this initial collection of voyage materials was designed to give English explorers information which might be useful in their attempts to circumvent the American continent; the same motivation underlay Hakluyt's edition of the Decades of Peter Martyr, another collection of American voyage narratives. Not until later did Hakluyt become interested in America for its own sake. He was posted to France between 1583 and 1588 as secretary and chaplain of Edward Stafford, the queen's ambassador. During this time, he collected and translated, both from written sources and interviews with Portuguese exiles, information about America.

The younger Hakluyt became a potent catalyst for the exploration movement at least in part because he was born at a critical time. When he began his career as a practical geographer, England's exploratory ventures were beginning to regain the impetus that they had lost since the beginning of the sixteenth century. He was instrumental in colonization and trading efforts, and so became one of the conduits for much of the ephemeral information then circulating, both in pamphlet and oral form. He collected, arranged, and published much of this information in the Principal Navigations. Hakluyt became an important consultant on travel: “As a classifying intelligence [Hakluyt] ranged the experience of the past and supplied it to the men of action.”⁹

But Hakluyt was more than just a behind-the-scenes chronicler and consultant. He was one of the twelve directors of the company formed to back Sir Walter Ralegh's abortive 1587 attempt to plant a colony in Virginia.¹⁰ He also played a seminal role by outlining what would become the English methodology of colonization. In 1584 he presented his treatise, Discourse of Western Planting, to Queen Elizabeth; in it he outlined a new approach to colonial expansion, unlike that of the Spanish. Instead of concentrating on the conquest of indigenous peoples and the commandeering and feudal administration of their wealth and land, as in the Spanish approach, Hakluyt proposed exporting the discontented and underemployed of England to new and relatively empty lands, with their abundance of raw materials. The colonists would harvest these resources, which would feed the growing manufacturing capability of England. Hakluyt's view stands in marked contrast to those of earlier English explorers. George Parks remarks that treasurehunting “effectually wrecked the first colonies.”¹¹ Hakluyt opposed to that a sense that staple and renewable commodities provided a better basis for colonization.

The Reverend Samuel Purchas, M.A. of St. John's College, Cambridge, appointed himself heir to Hakluyt's place in the history of travel literature, both concretely and intellectually. He wrote two treatises on the history and ethnology of the world's religions, Purchas his Pilgrimage (first published in 1614) and Purchas his Pilgrim (published in 1619), before embarking on his monumental capstone work Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (first published in 1625). The details of his life need not concern us here, except to observe that Purchas, like Hakluyt, was a historian of travel rather than a traveler himself. Even more than Hakluyt, Purchas was an observer rather than a participant (or even a consultant) in the momentous events of exploration and trade then taking place.

Around 1610, Purchas scraped an acquaintance with an aging and ailing Hakluyt, who was at that time collecting narratives for a further edition of the Principal Navigations. The contacts and interactions between Hakluyt and Purchas are unclear, but Purchas talks in his introduction to the Pilgrimes about being promised the legacy of Hakluyt's unpublished papers upon the latter's death. This apparent agreement was never put into writing, and Purchas ended up having to purchase Hakluyt's literary remains for an unspecified yet substantial sum in 1617. For all the apparent legal complications and disappointments Purchas must have experienced in acquiring these papers, he conscientiously acknowledges his debt to Hakluyt's research in the Pilgrimes. He also gained access to the records of the British East India Company (on condition of a promise to print no accounts of the East which reflected negatively on the English), records which he also used in compiling the Pilgrimes. One can easily see that Samuel Purchas was perceived differently from Richard Hakluyt, and that his career unfolded in a markedly different way. The differences between the collections that they constructed parallel their biographies.

That the Principal Navigations is an important set of documents is generally agreed, but critics disagree over the specific kind of importance it has. Froude's statement that the Principal Navigations is a prose epic sums up one side of Hakluyt's appeal. His narratives are powerful communicators of a national ethos to a wide audience. On the other hand, E. E. Speight characterizes the collection as “one of those monumental outcrops of miscellaneous literature” of the Elizabethan period; Parks affirms that lack of focus is Hakluyt's characteristic weakness.¹² These views stress the inclusiveness and heterogeneity of the materials collected, though the criticisms of Speight and Parks point out a certain lack of focus.

In literary terms, there is at least something to be said for calling the Principal Navigations an epic. Parks sums up the arguments this way: the book embodies “a theme of consequence” (as enunciated by its title and evidenced by its contents); “it … fill[s] its frame with the events of the moment,” and it “possess[es] dignity.” It “tell[s] a noble story of heroic characters.”¹³ The reader who examines specific narratives will see these requirements largely fulfilled.

But Hakluyt has, in literary terms, his shortcomings as well, chief among them what many commentators label his “diffuseness.” This is a natural consequence of Hakluyt's propensity as an archivist/historian for complete coverage of exploratory history in certain areas. His treatment of the Russian voyages illustrates that not only finished narratives are included, but also ships' logs, ambassadors' reports, and business and diplomatic documents. Besides adding a more complete picture, these non-narrative materials add tediousness for the reader conditioned to more conventionally literary expectations.

The reader who comes to Hakluyt's Principal Navigations sees a variety of narrators, each telling his own story in his own style. But the Principal Navigations contains more genres of communication than travel narratives—it contains maps, lists, instructions to merchant-explorers, and legal documents, among other things. The heterogeneity of the Principal Navigations makes it what it is: the supreme chronicle of the English Renaissance age of discovery, and a new kind of literary document as well. Hakluyt's organization of the collection is broadly directional (“Voyages to the North and Northeast Quarters,” etc., my emphasis) and, within that organization, chronological; it provides at least a broadly narrative movement, if not the strict beginning, middle, and end favored by some commentators. In addition, Hakluyt's editorial principles allow for other broadly literary effects: the completeness of the record, which includes many different kinds of written artifacts as well as graphic representations (maps), impresses a sense of specificity, factuality, and comprehensiveness upon the reader. One has almost a novelistic sense of the minute examination, not only of surface events and concrete facts in temporal progression, but of hidden motivations and conflicts not given by the surface narrative, and finally, of a comprehensive (or as comprehensive as historically possible) panorama of a geographical area, though in strictly personal terms.

The chronological ordering gives the reader a sense of both the sweep and the inchoateness of history, especially history as told in the terms of individual participants. Here the material runs counter to the literary expectation for closure—Hakluyt was collecting the primary material of an ongoing enterprise.

The simple prose style of many narratives and most of the supporting documents also frustrates literary expectations of layers of meaning and allusion, and symbolic representation of theme. Instead, the reader is confronted by straightforward, concrete description for the most part, and the narration of conflict based on confrontation with elemental situations, such as the struggle to keep a small ship afloat in the heavy seas of a storm, or among the ice floes of the north; the intrinsic difficulties of initiating contact with natives; the unexamined excitement of the quest for wealth and wonder; or the often fatal strains that result between expedition members confronted with unknown and threatening situations. All these characteristics, however, point the way to the simplicity and directness of the realistic tradition in the novel. Actually, writers do reach for symbols, comparisons, and allusions to relate their sense of wonder at the new to audiences at home. But in these narratives of discovery and exploration the wonder is based firmly in the concrete reality of the situation. The imagination must come into play less to create the reality than to bridge the gap between the new and wonderful environment and the familiarity of home.

Most of Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimes parallels Hakluyt's Principal Navigations in content as well as overall structure. One critic's comment that “the plan of the Pilgrimes is essentially the plan of the Principall Navigations” is quite right; the narratives are still arranged by geographic area, and within that scheme, by time.¹⁴ Purchas's material, however, is overwhelmingly narrative in form; there are few lists, original contracts, or other legal/historical documents. Because of this difference in material, Purchas somewhat modifies Hakluyt's structure and departs significantly from Hakluyt's editorial methods. The Pilgrimes' opening section concerning the ancient authorities on the validity and spiritual significance of travel, for example, does not fit into Hakluyt's framework. Purchas also concentrates more than Hakluyt does on contemporary narrators, and includes narrators from other countries (much of his South American information is Spanish and his African information, Portuguese). Yet, though Purchas writes for the armchair traveler, much Renaissance exploration information remains the same as what Hakluyt probably would have published had he decided not to concentrate mostly on British exploration. It is in the historical/legendary information that he epitomizes, in his inclusion of contemporary prototourists, and in his marginal editorializing that Purchas reveals his essential difference of aim most fully. Finally, the Pilgrimes contains around twenty-five percent more material than the second edition of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations.

Hakluyt's reputation as a geographer of travel is justly preeminent; as a literary source, the compilation captures the imaginations of the writers in more conventional genres, as Robert Cawley's Unpathed Waters chronicles at length.¹⁵ Further, Hakluyt's compilation works as a geographical reference, source of information for new exploration, and even a kind of propaganda, in the sense that the information given in the book is designed to feed the impulse to explore among its readers.

Many critical evaluations of Hakluyt's collection have come from historians of geography; these analysts are primarily concerned with Hakluyt's adherence to principles of objective historiography; they react favorably to his explicit editorial aim of inclusiveness, and they repeat the commonplace that Hakluyt as editor tampers very little with the material he uses. How far these commendatory opinions are accurate is another matter.

What contemporary critical opinion there is (both literary and historical) on Purchas's editorial efforts, and especially on the Pilgrimes, is decidedly negative. Philip Barbour says that “Purchas labored piously in a religious and proto-ethnological vein,” then goes on to give evidence for Purchas's bad editorial judgment.¹⁶ W. A. Raleigh castigates Purchas's handling of materials inherited from Hakluyt, saying that Purchas “scattered them about the four volumes of his Pilgrimes, after his irregular and curtailed or contracted manner, interspersed with remarks often silly, and always little to the purpose.”¹⁷ Critical opinion of Purchas rehearses two major themes: he is an active editor in ways that Hakluyt is not—specifically, Purchas edits out portions of his source materials in irregular ways; and Purchas comments on his materials in ways that Hakluyt does not, often preaching or making other inappropriate remarks. The sum effect of critical comment like this, comment which assumes principles of objective and scientific historiography as its criteria of quality, gives Samuel Purchas less than his due as a literary figure. Purchas intends something different from Hakluyt's revolutionary effort; the younger man stands within a consciously literary tradition embodied by late medieval pilgrimage narratives. Purchas's different audience and purposes are reflected by the specific editorial choices he makes.¹⁸ Most assessments of Purchas's accomplishment in the Pilgrimes are based on the assumption that his aims were primarily those of Hakluyt. But Purchas's style and aspects of his book's structure, as well, differ from Hakluyt's; his editorial style produces a work which has a greater affinity with pilgrimage writings than it does with the new kind of work that Hakluyt had produced. The relatively little recent critical attention that Purchas's collection has received proceeds on assumptions about his editorial aims and method which this analysis will show have been mistaken.

EDITORIAL AIMS AND PRACTICES

Hakluyt's editorial aims, as expressed in the dedications and prefatory epistles to the volumes of the Principal Navigations, are closely tied to certain biographical events which he retells. The most significant of these relates to his cousin, who indoctrinated him early with the wonders of geographical study:

I do remember that being a youth … it was my happe to visit the chamber of M. Richard Hakluyt my cosin … at a time when I found lying open upon his boord certeine bookes of Cosmographie, with an universall Mappe: he seeing me somewhat curious in the view therof, began to instruct my ignorance, by shewing me the division of the earth … he pointed with his wand to all the knowen … Territories of ech part, with declaration also of their speciall commodities, & particular wants, which by the benefit to traffike, & entercourse of merchants are plentifully supplied. From the Mappe he brought me to the Bible, and turning to the 107 Psalme, directed mee to the 23 & 24 verses, where I read, that they which go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his woonders in the deepe, & c. Which words of the Prophet together with my cousins discourse (things of high and rare delight to my young nature) tooke in me so deepe an impression, that I constantly resolved, if ever I were preferred to the University, … I would by Gods assistance prosecute that knowledge and kinde of literature. …

(PN, 1:xvii-xviii)

In this description, we can see implicit many motivations for the collecting activities and editorial practices of our compiler. Foremost is an academic and scientific curiosity about geography, which Hakluyt's cousin fleshes out and renders practical by talking about new geographical theories and the commodities of countries he points out. All this curiosity is validated by a reference to the Scriptures, which vindicate it as a primary motive.

As we look at Hakluyt's lifework, it is easy to see that complex motives underlie his collecting of this monumental group of voyage materials; among the principal of these motivations is patriotism, a new kind of patriotism implicit in Hakluyt's references to “the English Nation.” Hakluyt says that he was at first moved to collect his documents after he

both heard in speech, and read in books other nations miraculously extolled for their discoveries and notable enterprises by sea, but the English of all others for their sluggish security, and continuall neglect of the like attempts especially in so long and happy a time of peace, either ignominiously reported or exceedingly condemned. … Thus both hearing, and reading of the obloquie of our nation and finding few or none of our owne men able to replie heerin … my selfe … determined notwithstanding all difficulties, to undertake the burden of that worke wherin all others pretended either ignorance, or lacke of leasure, or want of sufficient argument. …

(PN, 1:xviii-xix)

This telling passage in Hakluyt's introduction underscores a point also made implicitly in the description of his personal introduction to geography—that Hakluyt's motives in publishing this record are at least partially emotional. At a basic emotional level, Hakluyt is motivated by his curiosity as a geographer; beyond that, he is move by love for his country to redress a wrong of which he has become aware during his foreign sojourn. Later on he will disclaim all motivation from considerations of fame or profit: instead he pictures the process of collecting and translating these documents as monetarily profitless toil. But, he says, someone must undertake this necessary task of historical documentation.

Not only can one see clearly in the dedications to both the first and second editions of the Principal Navigations that patriotism is the overarching motivation behind the publication of these records; the contents of both editions bear out this enunciated goal. The overwhelming majority of documents and narratives are English. G. B. Parks sees a slight change in focus between the first and second editions (the second edition includes some foreign narratives, most about places in America unexplored by the English), but acknowledges that these new changes in editorial policy are “implicit in the original plan.”¹⁹

Since during the interval between the publication of the first and second editions of the Principal Navigations England had developed a maritime power equal in might to Spain, Hakluyt was in the second edition more concerned to give information helpful to the main work of his life—furthering English colonial expansion. In fact, Hakluyt explains that he has included foreign information about areas of the world “where our owne mens experience is defective.”²⁰ Hakluyt intends at least the second edition of his compilation to provide as much information as possible (whether foreign or domestic) for English explorers and colonists to use. He does not, however, explicitly state this motivation.

Hakluyt's patriotic motive of silencing the foreign critics of England's maritime might comes out both in the narratives he includes and in the kind of editorial changes he makes. He includes many accounts of sea battles with Spain, some of which are irrelevant as exploration, and which are only nominally concerned with trade. The most noticeable of these is the account of the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada.²¹ In fact, it is in the inclusion of such a great mass of material that Hakluyt's patriotic motive is most clearly evident. He wants to disprove foreign notions about English “sluggish security” by the rhetorical expedient of simple accretion. During his introductory remarks, Hakluyt provides a catalogue which shows, by its sheer bulk, that English mariners and explorers have gone to all parts of the globe. Finally, Hakluyt wants

to speake a word of that just commendation which our nation doe indeed deserve: it can not be denied, but as in all former ages, they have bene men full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of the remote parts of the world, so in this most famous and peerlesse governement of her most excellent Majesty, her subjects through the speciall assistance, and blessing of God, in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world, and to speake plainly, in compassing the vaste globe of the earth more then once, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth.

(PN, 1:xx)

As expressed here, this view of English activity is grandiose and even unrealistic in scope, rather polemical than objective. Hakluyt was versed enough in voyage information to realize that at least three other countries had as strong a claim to have excelled more than any other in exploration. Spain had discovered the American continents in the first place, and within the ninety years since that discovery and the 1589 edition of The Principall Navigations had explored much of the coast of South America and a significant amount of southern North America, planting colonies along the way. Spain had also accomplished the first circumnavigation of the globe, as well as many Southeast Asian discoveries. Portugal, too, had explored the African coast and established a foothold on the Indian subcontinent on its way to trade with the Far East. France, another relative latecomer to the colonial scene, had already begun exploring the interior of North America, using the Saint Lawrence River and Great Lakes as routes of transportation. In the face of these historical facts, however, Hakluyt's sentiment most clearly expresses a mindset fixed upon positive achievement and possibility rather than on limitations. Such a mindset would comport well with forwarding the enterprise of English colonial expansion.

Besides his strictly patriotic and pragmatic motivations, Hakluyt had a historian's goal as well: he wanted to publish a complete record of England's involvement in maritime and exploratory ventures, as well as a general record of the historical sweep of England's foreign trade. This goal also leaves its mark on the contents and structure of the compilation. The bulk and scope of both editions of the work, and the huge increase in size between them (from approximately 700,000 words in the first edition to almost 1,700,000 words in the second edition),²² attest not only to Hakluyt's yen for completeness but also to his indefatigability as a collector of documents. As we have seen, Hakluyt's pragmatic and patriotic motives are mentioned explicitly in his introductions as impetuses. One must deduce Hakluyt's historical motives from other evidence: by his expressed admiration for the chronicler-historians who preceded him, and by the increasing size and comprehensiveness of the second edition of the Principal Navigations.²³

Only one other motivation is explicitly mentioned by Hakluyt in his introductions, and this motive is less an impetus to his writing than an underlying reason for exploration. We have already seen that, by his own admission, Hakluyt saw Scripture as both a source of inspiration for and a validation of his desire to study geography. As a man whose training and early occupation were the Christian ministry, this inspiration and validation must have been emotionally important. This emotional importance, however, only indirectly concerns the religious motive for exploration that Hakluyt mentions.

This motivation has two aspects: first, the chance that exploration gives to bring pagans to Christianity, and second, a sense of the Providence of God at work in England's history. Both of these aspects can be seen in this excerpt from Hakluyt's introduction to the second edition of the Principal Navigations:

Which action [exploration and colonization], if … it shal please the Almighty to stirre up her Majesties heart to continue with her favourable countenance … with transporting of one or two thousand of her people, and such others as upon mine owne knowledge will most willingly at their owne charge become Adventurers in good numbers with their bodies and goods; she shall by Gods assistance, in short space, worke many great and unlooked for effects, increase her dominions, enrich her cofers, and reduce many Pagans to the faith of Christ. The neglecting hitherto of which last point our adversaries daily in many of their bookes full bitterly lay unto the charge of the professors of the Gospell.

(PN, 1:lxvii)

The relative importance of the two reasons for exploration and colonization mentioned is readily apparent from the relative amounts of space that Hakluyt gives them here. Pragmatic reasons for exploration have been mentioned continually through the introduction; here Hakluyt puts in an argument for his own specific method of colonization, emphasizing its importance to the nation. This discussion of pragmatic motivations takes up most of the paragraph of which this quotation is a part. In context, the pragmatic arguments bracket the religious motive, which seems to be mentioned primarily out of obligation. The religious motive itself comes last in a list of advantages to the queen of colonization. Even the reason of proselytizing is curiously secondhand: other countries are criticizing England for its lack of religious zeal.

But the other aspect of the religious motive, God's providential working in the affairs of the English nation, runs through Hakluyt's discussion in a strong undercurrent. The Almighty must work in the queen's heart, stirring her up to sponsor expeditions; these expeditions, in their turn, need God's assistance to work great and surprising effects for the queen (who is in the second portion a metonymy for the country at large). The underlying point seems to be that God's assistance is needed in order to secure material and political benefits for the nation. It illustrates well the fact that for Hakluyt evangelism becomes a convenient and conventionally admired motive for exploration, though the reader senses that the editor's actual motives lie elsewhere.

Hakluyt's conditional sense of God's providence (that is, that certain things must be done so that God will bless the nation's exploration) is turned on its head elsewhere in his introductions. Talking about the Spanish Armada, he says,

I thinke that never was any nation blessed of JEHOVAH, with a more glorious and wonderfull victory upon the Seas, then our vanquishing of the dreadfull Spanish Armada, 1588. But why should I presume to call it our vanquishing; when as the greatest part of them escaped us, and were onely by Godes out-stretched arme overwhelmed in the Seas, dashed in pieces against the Rockes, and made fearefull spectacles and examples of his judgements unto all Christendome?

(PN, 1:lviii)

There is here almost an Old Testament sense of England as the chosen nation protected by God. Hakluyt says that God predestined the English to be victorious; by implication the astute and religiously inclined reader could have come to further conclusions as implied by earlier references to providence—if England is chosen by God for victory, under his direction victory in exploration (especially by sea) is also certain. Given this mindset, every successful exploration, sea battle, political advantage, or profit only serves as further evidence of God's providential care and glorification of the nation. This sense of destiny could only inflame exploring fervor. In this way, Hakluyt's rather naive patriotic confidence about England's exploratory efforts is reinforced by his religious sense of the nation's grand destiny in the scheme of divine providence.

A concentration on the religious dimension of travel and exploration is also apparent in the compilations of Samuel Purchas. Even the titles of his major works make clear that he conceived of travel in the spiritual terms of pilgrimage. These titles suggest Purchas's aim: first, to supply an explicit overall structure to disparate groups of travel narratives, groups that in Hakluyt had remained inchoate. Second, Purchas hopes to edify. The reader can see indications of this from his introductions and the reasoned defenses of travel that his collection includes; they contend that travel in books is better (or less open to miscarriage at least) than the real thing. But often for Purchas the edification of travel history can be specifically religious. Left to himself, Purchas explicitly revives the older pilgrimage tradition in his writing, as when he retells legends of Old Testament figures:

Of Salomon the holy Scriptures have thus recorded. I. Kings 9. 26, 27, 28. And King Solomon made a Navie of Ships. … And Hiram sent in the Navie his servants, Shipmen that had knowledge of the Sea with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir and sent from thence Gold 420. Talents, and brought it to King Solomon. And Cap. 10. 11. The Navie also of Hiram, that brought Gold from Ophir brought in from Ophir great plenty of Almug trees and precious stones; 12. And the King made of the Almug trees Pillars for the house of the Lord, & for the Kings House; Harps also and Psalteries for Singers: there came no such Almug Trees, nor were seen unto this day. …

This is an extract of Solomons Story, so much as concernes our present purpose, the authoritie whereof is Sacred, a Divine, infallible, inviolable, and undenyable veritie; the fitter ground for many high and worthy consequences hereafter to be delivered. I shall here leave to the Divinitie Schooles, in more leisurely contemplation to behold the Allegoricall sense (shall I say, or application?) wherein Solomon seemes to signifie Christ, his Navy the Church (long before lively represented in that first of Ships, the Ark of Noah) which in the Sea of this variable World seekes for the golden Treasures of Wisdome and Knowledge, with (that plentifull riches) the rich plentie of good workes. …²⁴

This passage harks back to the tradition of pilgrimage guides, which included travel information with an edifying spiritual sense, if read rightly. Purchas's use of allegory completely switches style and emphasis from the specific descriptions of Hakluyt's narrators, and even the nonreligious political allegories of late medieval travel writers. Instead of concrete details, the reader gets lists of commodities—certainly concrete in themselves, but not part of a picturable scene. The names are bare with no adjectival modifiers but those of quantity. Purchas concentrates here not on physical objects but on his attempt to allegorize a spiritual meaning for the story. The reader sees the Church as navy, as Noah's ark, with a cargo of golden treasures—godly wisdom and knowledge. Purchas is more concerned here with making a moral lesson vivid than he is with concrete descriptions of this journey.

Purchas often uses the allegorization of concrete situations to teach moral and theological lessons. But he is a Protestant, and from that viewpoint pilgrimage has become less a concrete journey than a metaphor for spiritual growth. Depending on the individual's inner spiritual condition, any journey can become a pilgrimage. It is the job of the Protestant minister (or clerical editor of travel narratives) to explicate in words this inner devotional act for his parishioners. Thus, as in a sermon, the reality symbolized by these words may be quickened to life in the mind of the hearer or reader. In a corollary to this, any ordinary life event or journey can be imbued with moral and spiritual significance, given the right interpreter. Purchas takes upon himself the task of spiritual interpreter for the history of English travel and exploration.

Given these essentially spiritual motivations, his work intends something quite different from the promotion of colonization, though the detail in which he treats the pioneering voyages of the English East India Company suggests that he does wish to promote sympathy for the difficulty of the new entrepreneurial trading ventures in the East. (The detailed treatment he gives the East India voyages also implies his special access to East India Company records.) But he mainly wants to offer his readers “a World of travellers to their domestike entertainment, easie to be spared from their smoke, Cup, or Butter-flie vanities and superfluities, and fit mutually to entertaine them in a better Schoole to better purposes.”²⁵ That is, Purchas writes for the edification of the leisure class, which by his day had already begun to turn exploration into other kinds of travel.²⁶ Some of Purchas's prefatory comments to the Pilgrimes make clear that the debate which the development of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European “Grand Tour” would raise in earnest had begun:

Travell is accounted an excellent Ornament to [gentlemen]; and therefore many of them comming to their Lands sooner then to their Wits, adventure themselves to see the Fashions of other Countries, where their soules and bodies find temptations to a twofold Whoredom, whence they see the World as Adam had knowledge of good and evill, with the losse or lessening of their estate in this English (and perhaps also in the heavenly Paradise) & bring home a few smattering termes, flattering garbes, Apish crings, foppish fancies, foolish guises and disguises, the vanities of Neighbor Nations (I name not Naples) without furthering their knowledge of God, the World, or themselves.

(Pilgrimes, 1:xliv)

Purchas hopes to offer all the advantages of travel through his book, with none of these disadvantages.

But he also has another, and higher, purpose. He wishes to promote wisdom, in this case, wisdom about the natural world. He describes his intentions in his epistle to the reader:

Naturall things are the more proper Object [of this work], namely the ordinary Workes of God in the Creatures, preserving and disposing by Providence that which his Goodnesse and Power had created, and dispersed in the divers parts of the World, as so many members of this great Bodie.

(Pilgrimes, 1:xxxix)

This statement, of course, tells the reader that Purchas will emphasize the theological implications of the works he edits (its oblique references to theological concepts are an implicit example here). Purchas's explicit acknowledgment of this purpose opens a great gulf between him and Hakluyt, although both are preachers.²⁷ Lessons in divinity and theology were never Hakluyt's real concern, but they are Purchas's. The sense of the difference between the two becomes even stronger when the reader discovers Purchas's conception of his role as editor.

And well may the Author [Purchas is speaking of his role as compiler here] be ranked with such Labourers (howsoever here a Master-builder also) for that he hath been forced as much to the Hod Barrow and Trowel, as to contemplative survaying: neither in so many Labyrinthian Perambulations thorow, and Circumnavigations about the World in this and his other Workes, was ever enabled to maintaine a Vicarian or Subordinate Scribe, but his own hands to worke, as well as his head to contrive these voluminous Buildings. …

(Pilgrimes, 1:xl-xli, bracketed interpolations mine)

Purchas's reference to himself as the “Author” expresses his sense of the importance of the editor's role. He sees it as an active part, analogous to that of the architect and supervisor of a building under construction. Purchas's religious, even medievally religious, conception of his role is borne out by the comparison of himself to a master-builder (or master-mason), the coordinator of and head laborer in the construction of a Gothic cathedral. Many of Purchas's comments, then, and all of his titles accentuate the moral and theological purposes behind his editing of the Pilgrimes. All these evidences remind the reader that this verbal cathedral, with its “labyrinthian Perambulations,” is built by many workmen like a medieval stone construction but given coherence by the presence of a supervising designer, the master-mason. This didactically theological intention, ancillary to (but not usually at odds with) the intentions of the travelers themselves, profoundly affects Purchas's editing process.

Explicit statements of editorial intention are only a part of the story, however. Actual editorial practices can either bear out or subvert those stated aims. Hakluyt, for example, explicitly states that he prefers to have his narrators speak for themselves:

And to the ende that those men which were the paynefull and personall travellers might reape that good opinion and just commendation which they have deserved, and further, that every man might answere for himselfe, justifie his reports, and stand accountable for his owne doings, I have referred every voyage to his Author, which both in person hath performed, and in writing hath left the same. …

(PN, 1:xxiii-xxiv)

This preference has educational and pragmatic value; the specificity of personal accounts is more profitable (in terms of scientific knowledge and personal survival) than the generalizations of theoretical geography. Into the bargain, the attachment of information to a specific narrator gives the opportunity to place either praise or blame; the individual becomes guarantor of his words. Such a policy creates an important, though implicit, editorial stance: it makes the direct telling of stories the focus of interest, a focus punctuated by supporting documents which flesh out the background of action. The editor, though invisible, has an important adjudicating role.

The primary way that Hakluyt accomplishes his patriotic goal of showing the grand scope of English exploratory activity, for example, is through the simple accretion of material. He piles narrative upon narrative, document upon document, to provide an overwhelming impression of English vitality. And he does all this in the words of the protagonists themselves. Though Hakluyt tampers relatively little with the narratives he does publish, considerations of politics and trade sometimes cause him to abridge materials or even omit them entirely. All these factors point to the pragmatic as well as patriotic thinking which dominates all of Hakluyt's editorial work.

On the subject of Hakluyt's pragmatic emendations of narratives, critical opinions vary. William Boring states that Hakluyt eliminated wordy preliminaries yet never tampered with any of the narratives themselves.²⁸ D. B. Quinn will not go so far, although he states, “If [Hakluyt] tampered with those words [of the voyage narrators] it was almost always to clarify, not to distort.”²⁹ Other critics, however, point to Hakluyt's judicious use of the editorial pencil on George Turberville's satiric poem about Russian customs and morals. Charles Armstrong comments as well on the excision of “The Voyage to Cadiz” from the second edition of The Principal Navigations, speculating that the disgrace of Essex, the commander of the voyage, prompted the censorship.³⁰ Further, several critics comment that Hakluyt has chosen only narratives that reflect favorably or at least neutrally on the participants, although in some cases he had less flattering accounts available. G. P. B. Naish comments that “the most brilliant exploit is not always the one best recorded. Nor does everyone get his deserts.”³¹

For example, E. G. R. Taylor states that Hakluyt used his “blue pencil” on the narrative accounts of Edward Fenton's abortive 1582-83 voyage around Cape Horn.³² The voyage was spoiled by Fenton's unfitness for command and by internal squabbles about how and where to plunder Spanish shipping. Luke Ward's narrative of his part in the voyage (printed in full in the 1589 Principall Navigations) is only part of the story, and not even the most perceptive account available. Richard Madox, appointed the Official Registrar of the voyage, penned an account which Parks says “contains as much sharp personal observation of the conflicts on board as any novelist would make.”³³ Parks notes that observations like Madox's could not be published, since they described in detail Fenton's growing paranoia and the crew's mutinous behavior.

In fact, critics who concentrate on specific narratives in the Principal Navigations often remark on Hakluyt's abridgment of texts, mainly for pragmatic reasons—perhaps a hero loses favor, or perhaps publishing the whole of a specific narrative about America might reduce its propaganda value, or perhaps Hakluyt doesn't want to offend a trading partner like the Russians.³⁴

One can see that the critical comments on The Principal Navigations have a peculiar and contradictory quality. Most critics will remark on the specific emendations they see in the material they study yet will repeat the commonplace that Hakluyt almost never tampers with the narratives he collects. An examination of scholarship on specific narratives reveals that Hakluyt did, in fact, exercise a good deal of editorial judgment over his collected Renaissance narratives. Specifically, his editorial intervention consists primarily of excision. He eliminates narratives for specific political reasons, as we have seen. He eliminated The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and David Ingram's narrative of his alleged American journey from the 1598 edition of the Principal Navigations, possibly because of his doubts about their veracity (although in the case of Mandeville there is no explicit evidence to confirm this motivation; he may instead have eliminated it because of its wide availability in print).³⁵ He kept out some versions of journeys because they conflicted with his purpose of idealizing English character. Finally, he eliminated almost all scholastic, deductive, geographical arguments—anything that interfered with the direct thrust of personal description in a narrative.

Purchas, on the other hand, lacks Hakluyt's overriding desire to let the travelers speak for themselves, although he continues to organize his material historically and regionally, as Hakluyt did. Instead, Purchas labors to reduce the “confused Chaos” of his authors by pruning repetitions, except when these repetitions are necessary for fuller testimony.³⁶ As editor, Purchas wants more than anything else to provide an orderly exposition of natural wisdom, with a theological bent. Further, just as a cathedral expresses the devotion of its builders, the compilation and construction of the Pilgrimes expresses its editor's devotion. Abridgment of narratives is necessary to achieve coherence, just as a concentration on the religious side of exploration history achieves his theological aims.

Critics have minimized Purchas's style as tendentious and moralistic, and there is no doubt that Purchas expresses an explicit and uncomplicated devotion to the Protestant orthodoxy of his day throughout his editorial commentary. But the critics, and especially the critics of Purchas's editorial methods, miss three important extenuating factors: first, Purchas's style owes much to Euphuism, and even to the complexity of the metaphysical conceit; second, Purchas is trying to revive (with Protestant and secularizing modifications) the older, more literary tradition of pilgrimage narrative, with its allegorical framework; and third, Purchas's editorial practices are not radically different from those of Hakluyt.

First, Purchas, unlike Hakluyt, is affected by the Euphuistic style. The reader is struck, even while reading Purchas's early introductions, with several features of Euphuism: within long, periodic sentences, Purchas constructs extensive and extended metaphorical structures. Some of these elaborate on a simile of natural history, but more often elaborate on some scriptural or religious theme. Purchas's marginal comments abound in alliteration, though not usually the more complex transverse alliteration. Given the editor's religious orientation, the reader expects the proverbs with which Purchas adorns his introductions, marginal comments, and other summaries. He is fond of the rhetorical question as well.³⁷ When Purchas likens his collection to a labyrinthine set of buildings (which image he later sharpens into a cathedral), characterizing himself as master mason, the reader has one example of an extended metaphor on a religious theme. Other of his metaphorical comparisons smack of the metaphysical conceit, as does this one which parallels the compass image of John Donne's “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”:

And as in Geometricall compasses one foote is fixed in the Centre, whiles the other mooveth in the Circumference, so is it with Purchas and his Pilgrimes, in this Geographicall compassing: they have their own motions, but ordered in this circumference, from, for, and by him which abideth at home in his Centre, and never travelled two hundred miles from Thaxted in Essex … where hee was borne.

(Pilgrimes, 20:130)

Like Donne's works, as well as writings in the Euphuistic style, Purchas abounds with sometimes alliterative puns, even puns upon his own name. Although scriptural and religious metaphors make up most of Purchas's conceits, he manages to inject a significant number of exempla of and proverbial statements about classical figures, as well as Latin tags.³⁸ Such ornateness suggests that Purchas wrote with an awareness of, if not a complete facility in, the ornaments of the Euphuistic school.

Second, Purchas is attempting to revive an allegorical framework within which to interpret travel, a framework which has much in common with the one assumed by the late medieval Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Whether or not this attempt is wrongheaded or anachronistic, it shows Purchas's fundamentally literary pretensions, pretensions less clouded by explicit and implicit pragmatic motives than those of Hakluyt and his narrators. Within the explicitly didactic framework that his religious values and allegorical tendencies set up, it is not surprising that Purchas makes comments on the morality of actions within the narratives he collects.

Modern critics see his editorial comments as evidence of unconscionable bias and have been tempted to oversimplify his intentions. One critic, commenting on Purchas's marginal notes and choice of incident in the East Indian narratives, says that “while Hakluyt's villains are the Spanish, Purchas's are the Dutch.”³⁹ Purchas himself, however, is careful to point out that he doesn't see the Dutch as a nation of villains.

If the Dutch have such [evil individuals] also, in the History of both I must mention both, and yet protest before God (to whom I shall answere it with the burning of bodie and soule, not these Bookes alone, if I bee perfidious) that I am not guiltie to my selfe of hatred to that Nation. …

(Pilgrimes, 1:xlix-l)

I would be glad to see agreement betwixt the English and the Dutch, both because I honour that Nation, as hath appeared in this whole work … of which the Dutch are so great a part and because in Region, Religion, Originall Nation, ingenious and ingenuous disposition, and (that which here brings both on our Stage) the glory of Navigation, they are so neere us, and worthie to be honored. (Pilgrimes, 13:2)

Other similar passages about the Dutch preclude such simple conclusions about Purchas's editorial aims. In fact, unlike the Principal Navigations, the Pilgrimes has few strictly pragmatic motivations: Purchas is concerned to teach lessons, but lessons of wisdom instead of colonial theory, lessons which stimulate interest and right attitudes through wondrous yet trustworthy facts rather than encouraging exploration through idealized portrayals.

Wisdome is said to bee the Science of things Divine and humane. Divine things are either naturall or supernaturall: these such, as the naturall man knoweth not, nor can know, because they are spiritually (with a spirituall Eye) discerned; called wisedome to salvation, the proper subject of Theologie, and not the peculiar argument of this Worke. …

(Pilgrimes, 1:xxxix)

But Purchas does not lack fulsomeness. His almost sycophantic dedications show that he would quickly stoop to the most exaggerated flattery if he thought it necessary (how much of this can be excused as conventional Euphuistic rhetorical complication is another matter). Nor is he above idealizing landscapes in description. His encomium on the Virginia colony is an example:

We hold it [Virginia] to be one of the goodliest parts of the Earth abounding with Navigable rivers full of varietie of Fish and Fowle; falling from high and steepe Mountaines, which by generall relation of the Indians are rich with Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper: another Sea lying within sixe dayes journey beyond them, into which other Rivers descend. The soile fruitfull and apt to produce the best sorts of commodities, replenished with many Trees for severall uses, Gums, Dyes, Earths and Simples of admirable vertues; Vines and Mulberry Trees growing wild in great quantities; the woods full of Deare, Turkies, and other Beasts and Birds.

(Pilgrimes, 20:134)

It is interesting to note, however, that this new idealization of landscape concentrates more on the natural resources vital to colonization than upon gold for the taking.

Finally, Purchas has been criticized for the kind and extent of his editing. Yet it is clear from the foregoing discussion of Hakluyt's editorial methods that the two editors differ more in degree than in kind. Most of Hakluyt's editing consists of excision, usually of entire sections of text. Yet Hakluyt is not above deleting without comment small amounts of text which he saw as politically, commercially, or philosophically inexpedient to publish. And Hakluyt sometimes speaks with his own voice in his compilations. In a significant number of cases, Hakluyt has concocted unified narratives from many sources in his own words. Purchas describes his own editorial methods this way:

I have … either wholly omitted or passed dry foot things neere and common; Far fetched and deare bought are the Lettice sutable to our lips. … My Genius delights rather in by-wayes then high-wayes.

… humane affaires are by Eyewitnesses related more amply and certainly then any Collector ever hath done, or perhaps without these helpes could doe. … and yet (except where the Author or Worke it selfe permitted not) these vast Volumes are contracted, and Epitomised, that the nicer Reader might not be cloyed.

(Pilgrimes, 1:xlii-xliii)

This “contraction” of material is, of course, more extensive than Hakluyt's; that is not to be wondered at, given the immense amount of material (around three million words) that Purchas saw fit to publish and the even more immense volume of material through which he had to sift. He certainly also “epitomizes,” but he makes clear that these passages are epitomes by using chapter headings and running sidenotes. This does not differ in kind from Hakluyt's practice of interviewing and collecting, then writing a coherent temporal narrative in his own terms. Purchas gives more space to editorializing; this fits the difference in intention between his collection and Hakluyt's. Purchas should not be judged in terms of criteria more appropriate to a different type of collection, as most critics have been prone to do. He is engaged on a project uniquely his own.

CONCLUSIONS

Historical critical opinion agrees that Hakluyt is unique as a promoter of early exploration and a chronicler in English of early journeys. He has also tried to break new ground as a recorder of travel. The cumulative effect of his revolutionary compilation of narrative and supporting contextual documents was to interest and inspire—especially to interest and inspire the possible patrons of voyages, but, more widely, to inspire the nation as a whole. Hakluyt realized, first of all, that the primary inspiration for the Renaissance voyagers and their backers was return on their investment. Ralegh characterizes the narratives of Hakluyt as “a record of failure.”⁴⁰ Critics generally agree that the thirst for gold (inflamed by the Spanish discovery of the golden empires of South and Central America), and the sense of America as the roadblock to trade with East India generally kept the English from effective colonizing efforts during most of the sixteenth century. None of America yielded any golden empire for the English, except in the form of Spanish ships to be plundered. And the plunderers, after early successes, soon found themselves faced by a better-armed and prepared Spanish fleet. In many ways, Hakluyt was forced to stress heroism and adventure as goals in themselves. It is, in fact, necessary as well as commendable that in his promotion of schemes for North American colonization he highlights the potential of the colonies to supply more mundane goods—naval stores, raw cotton, food, and furs—instead of the possibility of finding gold.

The motivations of Hakluyt's audience were diverse. The patrons of voyages, wealthy merchants, longed for quick returns on their investments. But potential voyagers themselves, nobles who longed for court advancement, had other concerns as well. Hakluyt catered to the thirst for adventure of this second group not by minimizing external hardships but by idealizing the internal relationships between the members of England's exploring expeditions. W. A. Raleigh speaks of the gentleman-adventurer as “a trouble-maker,” a divisive personality always on the lookout for gold and glory, often to the detriment of the expedition, yet Hakluyt's narratives relate remarkably little (and that not in detail) about the conflicts that arose.⁴¹ Instead, the narratives concentrate on the nobility involved in actions of war and discovery.

Seen in the light of these overarching motives, Hakluyt's smaller-scale editorial decisions fall into place: if one is to encourage exploration as an end in itself, apart from material profit, the value of exploration in and of itself as an experience must be emphasized. Hakluyt does this by carefully selecting the narratives through which he chronicles specific voyages. Explorers, however, need information, concrete and organized, as much as possible: Hakluyt organizes his narratives, and tries to include all the latest reliable information available, whether foreign or domestic. Thus, the huge increase in size of the second edition, the inclusion of foreign narratives, and (possibly) the exclusion of Mandeville and David Ingram's narratives from the second edition.

Even a decision that one could see as primarily aesthetic—Hakluyt's preference for narrative over “universall cosmographie”—Hakluyt defends pragmatically. Reliability and continuity are better assured when each narrator must “answere for himselfe, justifie his reports, and stand accountable for his owne doings.”⁴²

The reader's comprehensive impression of the Principal Navigations as a unified work, then, depends not only on the narratives themselves but also on the editorial decisions that Hakluyt has made. The appearance that Hakluyt has effaced himself as editor is belied by the reality of his decisions of selection and excision. The impression that the compilation produces is much more consciously designed than it appears on the surface. The sheer bulk of the collection produces (again by design) a sense of completeness and national comprehensiveness for the reader, as does the mixture of genres. Although the main literary interest of the collection lies in the narratives, the aesthetic effect of the collection as a whole is different from the effect of the narratives alone.

Samuel Purchas's intentions as an editor and his audience were quite different. He wrote to educate—in wisdom about the natural world and other cultures, and in morality. He also collected and epitomized the narratives of the Pilgrimes to provide an alternative to the possible dangers (moral and physical) of the Grand Tour. As a fairly uninvolved spectator of travel (unlike Hakluyt), Purchas wrote to an audience also composed of “travellers” who might well never leave home. His collection's structure is subservient to his organizing and moralizing purposes. His style reflects the less narrowly pragmatic ends of his compilation. Its ornateness is probably meant to delight, even if it does not always succeed.

Purchas does, however, seem to have other motives besides simply aesthetic and moral ones. Loren Pennington points out that Purchas was concerned to provide a philosophical and theological underpinning to the English colonial movement, and to propagandize in favor of some admittedly problematic English ventures in the East Indies.⁴³ Yet, finally, Purchas is less interested in propaganda than Hakluyt is—that is, if propaganda is defined as writing and editing slanted to sway opinion. Pennington's analysis shows that if Purchas intended to propagandize in this sense, he did a questionable job.⁴⁴ His compilation of the tragic voyages of the East India Company would certainly not encourage any new investors and explorers, although they might help an English audience sympathize with the men who faced such impossible odds. Nor are his narratives of America designed to encourage would-be colonists. Included among accounts of sea battles and captivity narratives is Anthony Knivet's relation of his adventures, which Purchas expected would help the reader “learne to be thankefull for thy native sweets at home.”⁴⁵ Given the ambiguity and indirection of what Pennington sees as Purchas's attempts at propaganda, one can conclude that Purchas's main editorial intention was not to generate propaganda in a narrow sense.

Richard Hakluyt intended to compile a new and eminently practical collection of eyewitness accounts of travel and exploration for an audience not specifically concerned with aesthetics. Purchas collected his material to fulfill the more traditional goals of literature—to teach and delight an audience who themselves might never travel far. Given these differences in purpose and audience, their editorial approaches sometimes differ in method, but more often simply in their level of explicitness. When read with these differences accounted for, each collection takes on unique values of its own, values too often unrecognized in modern critical comment.

Notes

1. The publishing history of the Principal Navigations is somewhat complex: there are two editions, the first published in 1589, the second between 1598 and 1600. The exact title of the 1589 edition is The Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation. The second edition is titled The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. Note the addition of the word “Traffiques” to the title of the second edition; possibly the title change reflects Hakluyt's changing view of the scope and purpose of his compilation and English journeys in general. The two editions have other significant differences. The second edition is more than double the size of the first; the significance of this will be discussed later in this essay. But just as interesting are several excisions from the second edition, some of which will also be discussed.

   All quotations from the Principal Navigations in this article are from the second edition, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903). Subsequent references will be parenthetical in the text, abbreviated as PN.

2. This quotation from Froude comes from England's Forgotten Worthies, Short Studies on Great Subjects (London, 1891), 443-501, as cited in David Beers Quinn, The Hakluyt Handbook, 2 vols. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1974), 2:582.

3. George Bruner Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, Special Publication no. 10 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1928), 56 and xiv respectively.

4. The Hakluyt Handbook, 1:79, citing booksellers' records of circa 1700, asserts that during the eighteenth century, Purchas's collection was more popular than Hakluyt's.

5. Ernle D. S. Bradford, Christopher Columbus (New York: Viking, 1973), 71.

6. Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery (London: Temple Smith, 1974), 1-8.

7. George Bruner Parks, The Forerunners of Hakluyt (1926), repr. in Washington University Studies, Humanistic Series 13 (n.d.): 345.

8. Parks, Hakluyt and the English Voyages, 16-20, 44, respectively.

9. Ibid., 133.

10. Ibid., 134-35.

11. Ibid., 51.

12. E. E. Speight, ed., Hakluyt's English Voyages (London: Horace Marshall and Son, 1905), xii; and Parks, Hakluyt and the English Voyages, 157, respectively.

13. Parks, Hakluyt and the English Voyages, 187, 190, respectively.

14. Ibid., 227.

15. Robert Ralston Cawley, Unpathed Waters: Studies in the Influence of the Voyagers on Elizabethan Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940).

16. Philip Barbour, “Samuel Purchas, the Indefatigable Encyclopedist Who Lacked Good Judgment,” in Essays in Early Virginia Literature Honoring Richard Beale Davis, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 36, 38 ff.

17. W. A. Raleigh, The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, [1906] 1910), 133.

18. In Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 111-12, Donald R. Howard alludes briefly to Purchas's kinship with the older literary tradition of pilgrimage writing, as evidenced by the title of Purchas's compilation.

19. Parks, Hakluyt and the English Voyages, 176.

20. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 1:lxxvi.

21. Ibid., 4:197-235.

22. Parks, Hakluyt and the English Voyages, 175.

23. An example of Hakluyt's expressed admiration of his predecessors can be found in the Principal Navigations, 1:xxiv.

24. Samuel Purchas, ed., Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, 20 vols., Hakluyt Society, extra ser. vols. 14-34 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), 1:4-5. Subsequent references will be parenthetical in the text as Pilgrimes.

25. Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1:lxiv.

26. William C. Boring, in “English Literature of Exploration, Discovery, and Travel as Genre: 1509-1625” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1979), 70-73, discusses Purchas's new audience and some of his motivations.

27. Specifically in the previous passage, Purchas alludes to Providence; in the unquoted context of this passage, he also refers directly to wisdom in a theological sense, and to the idea that the natural world is a spiritual body.

28. Boring, “English Literature of Exploration,” 69.

29. David Beers Quinn, intro., The Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1589 ed., ed. Richard Hakluyt, Hakluyt Society, extra ser. 34 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1965), x.

30. Respectively, Lloyd E. Berry, “Richard Hakluyt and Turberville's Poems on Russia,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 61 (1967): 350-51; and Charles E. Armstrong, “The Voyage to Cadiz in the Second Edition of Hakluyt's Voyages,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 49 (1955): 256-57.

31. Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, 1:32-33.

32. Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor, ed., The Troublesome Voyage of Captain Edward Fenton, 1582-1583: Narratives and Documents (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1959), vii.

33. Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, 1:120.

34. Quinn, intro. Principall Navigations, xii-xiii, xxi-xxii, xxxi, xliii.

35. Quinn's introduction to the Principall Navigations (p. 1) mentions Ingram's and Mandeville's exclusion. In the first edition, Hakluyt apparently worked from a Latin version of Mandeville's Travels, even though English versions were available (according to Andrew A. Tadie, “Hakluyt's and Purchas's Use of the Latin Version of Mandeville's Travels,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Turonensis, ed. Jean Claude Margolin [Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1980], 539), specifically Thomas East's 1582 translation. Almost certainly both East's translation and Hakluyt's Latin manuscript were some form of the Defective Version. The Latin manuscript Hakluyt used omits some passages contained in even the English translation. (Tadie speculates that the translation contained passages of little interest to seafarers, prompting Hakluyt's choice.) The Hakluyt Handbook (2:343-44) cites the Latin manuscript used by Hakluyt as “n.d., n.p. B.M., IA 47355.” This does not correspond to any entry in Malcolm Letts's supposedly comprehensive bibliography in the study, Sir John Mandeville: The Man and His Book (London: Batchworth Press, 1949).

36. Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1:xliv.

37. For a list of the rhetorical distinctives of the Euphuistic style, see George K. Hunter, John Lyly, the Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 265.

38. See, for example, Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1:2.

39. Loren E. Pennington, “Hakluytus Posthumus: Samuel Purchas and the Promoters of English Overseas Expansion,” The Emporia State Research Studies 14.3 (1966): 14.

40. Ralegh, English Voyages, 193.

41. Ibid., 86.

42. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 1:xxiii-xxiv.

43. Pennington, “Hakluytus Posthumus,” 13-14.

44. See ibid., 9.

45. Purchas, Pilgrimes, 16:151.