The Hakluyt home was “filled with a small mountain of manuscripts and books” as he spent his life reading, listening to exciting stories, gathering details, and writing books on travel and exploration. He left no known correspondence, details of his personal life are sketchy, and his passing was hardly noted (similar to his contemporary William Shakespeare who died six months earlier in 1616). Yet he spent time with great explorers like Martin Frobisher and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, traveled to France to gather intelligence about French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese exploration, and translated their accounts into English. He was a man operating behind the scenes, and his importance to the nation is reflected, at least in part, by his burial in Westminster Cathedral.

The English claim on North America was based on the voyages of John Cabot who sailed aboard the Matthew in the previous century. This most providential venture was cited by English fishermen for many years, and Hakluyt listed it as the basis for settlement less than a century later. While most English explorers were looking for a northwest passage to the Far East, Hakluyt’s plan was far more ambitious.

At the top of his list was evangelism. He noted that the Spanish had planted more than two hundred churches in America in a century and determined that the English could do much better — promote the truth and roll back Rome at the same time.

Second, North America would provide new markets for English goods. The English claimed a just title to North America (a la Cabot), they hoped for alliances with the natives to help stop Spain, a colony would provide strategic positions for attacking the treasure fleet, abundant natural resources could be exploited, a northwest passage could still be pursued, and English criminals could be transported to help populate new lands — the prolific travel writer offered something for everyone.

In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh was granted a patent to “discover, search, find, out and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries, territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people.” Two of Raleigh’s captains soon brought stuff from Virginia and a wealth of ethnographic material for Hakluyt — friendly natives, good traders. Through it all, Hakluyt warned of the precarious nature of exploring and settlement. The record was clear that tropical diseases, unfriendly natives, and the Atlantic Ocean itself all contained fatal consequences for the unwary and careless; and he wrote that “few of those who venture outward grow to gray hairs.”

By the time the Virginia Company was being launched, Richard Hakluyt had published a trilogy of best-selling books known as The Principle Navigations, and he himself was celebrated in prose and poetry as the preeminent English authority on the Americas. Travelers carried his books everywhere. He held stock in the Virginia Company, but he left England only to travel to France for Walsingham and the Queen. After the settlement in 1607 he turned his North America documents over to the Rev. Samuel Purchase and turned his attention to researching the exploration of the Pacific Ocean. The patent for the Virginia Company reflected Hakluyt’s rules of settlement: don’t settle on the coast — go a hundred miles up a river and find a 50 ton anchorage, carry small boats for river navigation, take at least 120 men with a broad division of labor, never give guns to the natives, and make them think you never miss, establish trade as soon as possible, and hide your dead so the naturals don’t know your losses.

We don’t know why Hakluyt never went to Jamestown. He eagerly read John Smith’s True Relations, but after 1609 he never wrote of America again. By the time he died, Hakluyt had published 26 books; explorers named rivers, islands and mountains after him. In 1611, the East India Company instructed their main captain to “take with him to India the religious works of William Perkins, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages, to recreate their souls with a variety of history.”

Hakluyt believed that books could sway the English people to support colonization. To that end he dedicated his life to that form of communication and prayed that God would use his words to expand His kingdom to the New World and beyond. He was a scholar par excellence who left the adventures to hardy, fearless, and sometimes feckless souls who in the end got all the press and whose images adorn the history texts. Nonetheless, without the gifted and motivated translator and writer, the USA might stand for United Spanish America.

Reviewed by William Potter