Book Recommendation:
Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America by Peter Mancall
BBC 4 Programme: The Explorer’s Handbook
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bk2k1x (check on iPlayer to see when it’s next available!)
Radio 3 Free Thinking including Richard Hakluyt
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0801rn5
Sources:
Detweiler, Robert. “Was Richard Hakluyt a Negative Influence in the Colonization of Virginia?” The North Carolina Historical Review 48, no. 4 (1971): 359-69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23518177.
https://publicdomainreview.org/2016/10/26/richard-hakluyt-and-early-english-travel/
Rough Transcript: Richard Hakluyt
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Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity. This is Episode 114, and I’m back thinking about travel, and specifically about Richard Hackluyt. His story, as England’s first travel writer, is fascinating for anyone, but especially when you add in to it the fact that he never travelled himself, and then the long lasting effects he had on English exploration. So this week we’re going to talk about exploration, and armchair travel.
But, I have a very important announcement to make first which involves real travel, and that is… Tudorcon. Yes, you heard that right. I am organizing and hosting the world’s first ever Tudorcon. In October 2019 we will gather at a newly restored winery adjacent to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire in Manheim PA (which is, incidentally, where I’m from originally) and have three days of merriment, learning, feasting, and entertainment. The weekend will kick off on Friday October 18 with a welcoming party with refreshments, and period entertainment and games. Costumes are definitely encouraged for this part! On Saturday we will have a full day of learning from speakers – I’m still lining up the speakers, with three confirmed so far, and more being considered. On Sunday morning we reconvene for a morning of talks, followed by a medieval feast in the feasting grounds of the Renaissance Faire, with private entertainment, and then time to spend at the faire, before calling it a weekend.
The goals of the event are first and foremost, to bring together this amazing community from around the country, and the world, even, and have a weekend of social learning, new friendships, and bonding over our shared love of Tudor history. And second, to meet some of our favorite bloggers, authors, and podcasters.
Tickets for Tudorcon will be at an early bird price for the remainder of the year. They are available to buy at my shop website – TudorFair.com – the link is right there in the top left. We only have 120 seats available because of the size of the space, and they will likely sell out – I already sold nearly 20% of the available tickets in the first six days after announcing it on Facebook. So if you think you’d like to come, you should get your tickets early so you reserve your spot. Again, TudorFair.com to get those highly sought-after tickets – if you’re on your phone right now, you can check it out while you’re listening – Come spend a weekend in October next year with me, and 119 of your new best friends, and we’ll talk Tudor all weekend long!
So, now let’s talk about Richard Hackluyt. Born in 1553, he watched through his early adulthood as England stood by and let Spain and Portugal build an empire in the New World. The English navy was considered a joke, and their primary exploration voyage thus far had led them to Moscow by heading North and then East. Trading furs and rejecting a marriage offer from Ivan the Terrible was interesting, but it wasn’t going to lead to empire.
After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, though, things started looking good for England. Maybe she could head over to the America’s and found an actual long lasting settlement. Those of you who remember a few episodes ago when we talked about Roanoke will remember that it was happening just as the Armada was fought, and that led to the holdup of supplies ships getting back to the colony. When Elizabeth died in 1603 England still did not have one permanent settlement in the New World. English exploration was underfunded, unorganized, and needed a cohesive strategy to support it and plan the voyages.
In the context of these early explorations, a man by the name of Richard Hackluyt began compiling travelers stories, maps, and information about the New World. While not his first travel book, the one for which he is most remembered has a title alone that deserves study: “The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation: Made by Sea or Over Land to the Most Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compasse of These 1500 Years: Divided into Three Several Parts According to the Positions of the Regions Whereunto They Were Directed; the First Containing the Personall Travels of the English unto Indæa, Syria, Arabia … the Second, Comprehending the Worthy Discoveries of the English Towards the North and Northeast by Sea, as of Lapland … the Third and Last, Including the English Valiant Attempts in Searching Almost all the Corners of the Vaste and New World of America … Whereunto is Added the Last Most Renowned English Navigation Round About the Whole Globe of the Earth.”
Published in 1589, Principal Navigations is a record of the experiences, voyages, and adventures of a group of explorers whose names are known to anyone who has studied the Age of Discovery. But it isn’t just a work that focuses on the famous people. It also shares stories of lesser known individuals who would be lost to us but for this book. Hackluyt’s influence on travel and exploration helped turn England into the dominate sea force within a hundred years.
But the great irony is that Hackluyt never went to America, and he only left England one time – for France. Hackluyt was an orphaned second son of a Welsh family that had settled in Hertfordshire. His education was supported through scholarships, and he tells the story of how he discovered geography as a very young boy by seeing “an universal Mappe” on the desk of his guardian (who was also his cousin). That cousin, also named Richard Hackluyt, then moved geography into a Biblical lesson when he spoke of Psalm 107, a verse about going “down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”
In 1570, Hackluyt went to Christ Church Oxford with financial support from the Skinners’ Company. When “his exercises of duty first performed”, he decided to read all the printed or written voyages and discoveries that he could find. He got his Master of Arts in June 1577, and began giving public lectures in geography. He was the first to show “both the old imperfectly composed and the new lately reformed mappes, globes, spheares, and other instruments of this art”, lecturing in academic circles on maps, globes, and geography in general.
Hakluyt was ordained in 1578, the same year he began to receive a “pension” from the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers to study divinity. The pension would have lapsed in 1583, but William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, intervened to have it extended until 1586 to aid Hakluyt’s geographical research.
In 1582 he published his first book, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of all by our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons. Several nobles noticed him because of this book, namely Lord Howard of Effingham, and Sir Edward Stafford, Lord Howard’s brother-in-law. He was then selected as chaplain and secretary to accompany Stafford, now the English ambassador at the French court, to Paris in 1583. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s Spymaster, asked him to spend his time mainly collecting information of the Spanish and French movements, and “making diligent inquirie of such things as might yield any light unto our westerne discoveries in America”.
While in France he overheard rumors and disparaging remarks about English seafaring capabilities. He wrote that 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 […] either ignominiously reported, or exceedingly condemned.”
And so he began work on his Principal Navigations. In the world of travel writing there wasn’t a lot of precedent to go on. There were works by the German cosmographer Sebastian Muenster, whose Cosmographia of 1544 was the earliest German-language description of the world. It was one of the most successful and popular works of the 16th century, going through 24 editions in 100 years, and featuring descriptive woodcuts (including some by Hans Holbein), in addition to including the first to introduce “separate maps for each of the four continents known then–America, Africa, Asia and Europe.”
But Hackluyt didn’t want to follow this model, considering it boring, and weary, to just list geographical descriptions.
Then there was the model of people like the Englishman Richard Eden, who, until his death in 1576, translated the writings of other explorers and cosmographers, including Muenster.
The thing Hackluyt wanted to do, the difference he wanted to provide, was that he wanted to focus on the writings and descriptions that were first hand, written by the sailors, captains, and merchants themselves. The private letters and records that were circulating around in various companies, and homes. This was what he wanted to capture, and preserve for posterity, before it was lost forever. He makes very clear in the introduction that he’s preserving others’ words, and not his own. ““Whatsoever testimonie I have found in any author of authoritie appertaining to my argument, either stranger or naturall, I have recorded the same word for word, with his particular name and page of booke where it is extant.”
And while we tend to focus on Hackluyt and the way he drove colonization of America, it’s worth noting that he doesn’t focus just on America. In his book we find nuggets like e Thomas Stevens’ letter to his father. Stevens was an English Catholic who went to Rome to become a Jesuit priest, and he then became the first Englishman to reach Goa in 1579. He described the passage around the Cape of Good Hope: “Their gums waxe great and swell, and they are faine to cut them away, their legs swell, and all the bodies becommeth sore, and so benummed, that they cannot stirre hand nor foot, and so they die of weaknesse, others fall into fluxes and agues, and die thereby.”
We also get stories of wonders, like Dionyse Settle’s first person account of Martin Frobisher’s 1577 voyage to northeastern Canada. It discusses seeing icebergs, and a dead narwhal, whose single tusk, “of length two yards lacking two inches,” led the sailors to believe that they had seen a “sea unicorn”.
There are also stories that all travelers even now could relate to – the tedium of having your hopes built up about a particular place, only to realize that it really wasn’t as great as you thought it was, and the journey to get there was a pain. Stephen Parmenius wrote a letter to Hakluyt himself in August 1583. He writes of his disappointment when he arrived at St John’s Harbour as a crew member of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage to Newfoundland. “The trees for the most part are Pynes, and all the grasse here is long, and tall, and little differeth from ours.” He hadn’t spotted a single mermaid even though everyone said they had arrived – imagine traveling to see the most perfect waterfall, or something else like that, and showing up, and it turning out that it was barely a trickle. That’s how Parmenius felt. When they had stocked up on supplies “in this place”, Parmenius hoped, “we purpose by the helpe of God to passe towards the South”, to the greater things “that are reported of those Countreys, which we go to discover.” Alas, by the time Hackluyt received the letter, he would have known that Parmenius was lost at sea several weeks later, along with Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Two of the original five ships returned carrying the letters and stories of the lost men, including the letter to Hackluyt.
The first, 1589 edition was over 800 folio pages. By 1600, the second edition was over 1,760,000 words in three folio volumes and about two thousand pages. But his work also inspired others to publish their own accounts and translations. In an article from Public Domain Review, Nandini Das of the University of Liverpool writes, “ Thomas Hariot, who wrote about his influence in The Briefe and True report of the new found land of Virginia (1590) and John Pory, who claimed that Hakluyt was “the onely man that mooued [him] to translate” John Leo Africanus’ History of Africa, were two among many. Hakluyt’s own translations included, among others, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius’ enormously influential treatise, the Mare liberum (The Free Sea or The Freedom of the Seas), which argued that no nation could impose restrictions on seafaring trade since the sea did not belong to any single nation. His reports on trade opportunities and commodities, navigation conditions, and local inhabitants were commissioned by London’s growing trading companies like the Virginia Company and the East India Company, while The Principal Navigations became one of those books that their ships were recommended to carry as essential reading. By the time of his death, Hakluyt’s work and advocacy of Protestant English settlements and colonies in the New World, both in writing and as an advisor to the state and the trading companies, had become the cornerstone of English colonial and imperial plans and established the legacy of English explorations in general.”
In the late 1590s Hakluyt became the personal chaplain of Robert Cecil, Lord Burghley’s son, who was to be Hakluyt’s most fruitful patron. Hakluyt dedicated to Cecil the second (1599) and third volumes (1600) of the expanded edition of Principal Navigations and also his edition of Galvão’s Discoveries (1601). Cecil, who was the principal Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and James I, rewarded him by installing him as prebendary of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster on 4 May 1602. In the following year, he was elected archdeacon of the Abbey. For years scholars have speculated on the role that Hackluyt’s Protestant religious persuasions played in his race to explore faster than the Catholic Spanish.
Hakluyt was married twice, once in or about 1594 and again in 1604. In the licence of Hakluyt’s second marriage dated 30 March 1604, he is described as one of the chaplains of the Savoy Hospital; this position was also conferred on him by Cecil. His will refers to chambers occupied by him there up to the time of his death, and in another official document he is styled Doctor of Divinity (D.D.). In 1606 he appears as the chief promoter of the petition to James I for letters patent to colonize Virginia, which were granted on 10 April 1606.[5] His last publication was a translation of Hernando de Soto’s discoveries in Florida, entitled Virginia Richly Valued, by the Description of the Maine Land of Florida, Her Next Neighbour (1609).
Nandini Das writes “Hakluyt’s legacy was not just a nationalistic celebration of English imperial ambitions. The Principal Navigations memorialises not just the successes of English travels, the great figures and great wonders, but also the elusive traces of those who disappeared, the disappointment of the non-event, the tedium of travel, and the absence of wonder. Beyond the great figures of Raleigh, Frobisher, and Gilbert, beyond the pioneering circumnavigations of Drake and Cavendish, Hakluyt’s collection stands testimony to the ordinary traveller and the individual experience of travel — fragile, unexpected, and so often hostage to fortune.” With “voices like that of young Parmenius of Buda, who had hoped to write a new Latin epic…and sunk with a ship called The Delight, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations bears witness to the lives of hundreds of travellers, without whom the story of “English” travels and voyages would be much the poorer.”
So I’m going to leave it there for this week – The book recommendation is Hakluyt’s Promise An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America
There are links on the website at Englandcast.com.. And you can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or through twitter @teysko or facebook.com/englandcast. And remember to get your Tudorcon tickets at Tudorfair.com.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.