Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt, eds., Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe. Hakluyt Society, extra series, v. 47. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. xxiv + 369 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4094-0017-2. $120 cloth.
Geographer, editor, translator, clergyman, commercial advisor, intelligencer—the younger Richard Hakluyt is best known today in connection with travel-writing, shepherding at least twenty-five works into print in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Chief among them is the magisterial collection, the Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, incorporating travel accounts from antiquity to the very recent past, primarily from English travellers. First published in one large folio volume in 1589, by the second edition (1598-1600) it had expanded to three no less hefty volumes. Some of Hakluyt’s sources were already in print, some already translated into English, but many were acquired, edited and translated by Hakluyt with great effort and care. The sheer size, diversity and complexity of his collection and the assiduous labour that went into editing it qualify Hakluyt as a major scholar of the period. But, as with Spenser, it wasn’t his day-job: Hakluyt was a clergyman who only ever travelled as far as Paris himself. Whether his motives in collecting, editing and publishing these travel narratives were primarily political or spiritual remains uncertain. Certainly, the conspicuous bluster of the first edition’s Englishness (to the extent of including the discredited John Mandeville amongst its travellers) gives way to a more pragmatic focus on New World colonization in the second edition, making it a witness as well as a prop to the expansion of English colonial and mercantile activity in the late sixteenth century. It is chiefly on account of the Principal Navigations, and his patriotic declarations about English travellers whose “sluggish” reputation abroad he seeks to counter, that he has been treated as little more than an “imperial propagandist,” as his DNB biographer Anthony Payne notes—and with a certain scholarly neglect, at least until very recently.
This impressive collection of twenty-four essays by new and leading scholars in travel writing internationally, skilfully edited by Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt, begs to differ. As a volume, it makes a case that Europe and European intellectual and political life, and not just England and the proto-imperial rhetoric of English nation-building, is the proper intellectual and political context within which to locate Hakluyt’s work, both in its origins and influences. For someone who only ever travelled abroad once in his life—and that a mere hop across the English Channel—Hakluyt’s interests, expertise and connections were astonishingly international, even global. It is these broader contexts and connections that this collection so successfully brings into view, and which reveal a far more interesting and complex Hakluyt than the imperializing caricature allows. But for all the thousands of pages of his texts, his international recognition and powerful patrons, the figure of Hakluyt himself remains difficult to discern. To fill in his contexts is the declared aim of this collection. The collection has a dual purpose. Besides re-energising scholarship on Hakluyt, travel writing and early modern cultural and historical studies more generally, it is also a handsome scout for the Oxford Hakluyt project, currently producing a new fourteen-volume scholarly edition of the Principal Navigations, the first complete edition in over a century.[1] This, too, is led by Carey and Jowitt, and many of the editors of individual volumes there have contributed essays here. As a preview of the edition, all indications are that Hakluyt will be returned to his place as a major figure in both the English and European Renaissance. The question that students and scholars are most likely to ask of the forthcoming edition, however, is not who Hakluyt was but “how am I to read these fourteen volumes?”
Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe would be a very good place to start. It studies the Principal Navigations alongside Hakluyt’s other works: notably the manuscript that has come to be known as the “Discourse of Western Planting” (1584) and his first foray into print, the Divers Voyages (1582), as well as the other travel writings he helped into print, including those of his successor, Samuel Purchas. It presents important new work on Hakluyt’s sources, influences, editorial strategies and contribution to the genre of travel collections, as well as its significance in English and European intellectual and political history. The essays (too numerous to recapitulate here, but a table of contents follows this review) range from close comparisons of particular sources and editions (Das, Schleck, Lorimer, Stout) to longer or broader views on Hakluyt and his influence in European intellectual history (Rubiès, Mentz) and European travel writing (Small, Trakulhun, Holtz, Day). Another set tackle the old chestnut of the balance of Hakluyt’s political and spiritual agenda (Sacks, Boruchoff, Pirillo, Borge, Dimmock), while more traditionally literary approaches through rhetoric, reading, genre and literary influence produce no less interesting views of the Principal Navigations as a Renaissance work (Fuller, Klein, Carey, Heale, Jowitt). In fact, Mary Fuller’s essay wittily but aptly confronts the very challenges of reading the Principal Navigations in her survey of three different kinds of “dullness” that reading it entails. Also useful for the nervous reader is Anthony Payne’s salutary contextualization of Hakluyt in relation to sixteenth-century England’s overseas trade during Hakluyt’s lifetime, which, together with Roy Bridges’s essay on the history of the Hakluyt Society, book-ends this substantial volume. The collection’s sections are helpfully organised, the prose throughout clear and unfussy and the essays anchored by strong thesis statements—all signs of skillful editing by Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt and qualities they bring to their solid Introduction. The standard of essays is markedly high.
The shifting forms of geographical, historical and ethnographic writing in the period and the move away from the hegemony of universal cosmography (“beyng in deed most untruly and unprofitablie ramassed and hurled together,” as Hakluyt himself describes it) and the gradual emergence of travel writing as a scholarly home for this kind of knowledge, helps Joan-Pau Rubiès argue for Hakluyt’s influence in the emergence of travel writing as “a distinctive genre central to the late Renaissance system of knowledge” (26). Sven Trakulhun traces Hakluyt’s influence on German travel writing through his connections with Theodor de Bry and perhaps Levinus Hulsius, both within the “Republic of Letters” and through their commitment to Protestant colonization. Hakluyt was to provide Pierre Bergeron with “the seed idea and model” for a specifically French travel-writing collection, as Grégoire Holtz shows, and aspects of Hakluyt’s nationalistic articulation of the travel narratives continued to shape English travel writing well into the eighteenth century, as Matthew Day demonstrates. Displacing still further the English national and imperial frame is the selection of essays on Hakluyt’s transactions with other genres and other intellectual paradigms: the gendered romance landscape of Virginia so creepily developed by Purchas, in Carey’s essay; the global vision of interconnectedness demanding active, heroic Christian piety that Elizabeth Heale identifies; the maritime centering of Hakluyt’s humanist and theological practice that Steve Mentz proposes. Ironically, the section on Hakluyt’s editorial practices is more patchy, although the essay on Ralegh, Hakluyt and Guiana by Joyce Lorimer (who has previously edited Ralegh’s Discoverie of […] Guiana [1595]) beautifully demonstrates the rewards of scrupulous attention to Hakluyt’s editing. Massive though the Principal Navigations is, the question of what’s not there also proves salient. For example, Peter Mancall’s study of the paucity of visual images or maps explores to brilliant effect the possible reasons why Hakluyt deviated from his practice elsewhere, neglecting resources available to him.
Hakluyt’s was not the first collection of travel-writing, nor was it even the first such English collection: Richard Willes’s expansion of Richard Eden’s translation of sections of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s De orbe novo (The Decades of the Newe World or West Indies [1555]) has that distinction. However, as Margaret Small shows, the Eden and Willes collection was much less important to Hakluyt as a model than were the Venetian Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s several volumes of travel accounts, Della Navigationi et Viaggi (1550-59). But despite his clear and acknowledged debts to Ramusio, Hakluyt’s “Europe” is dominated by Spain, and English rivalry with Spain is a large part of the story of the origins and outcomes of both editions of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, both as rival and model. Certainly Hakluyt encouraged England to seek to beat Spain in the imperial game and actively to obstruct Spanish New World activities—all the while constructing the Spanish imperial model as one to be avoided, as Diego Pirillo argues. Again and again Hakluyt treads a fine line between glorifying English voyages (especially in the first edition of 1589, so soon after the wreck of the Armada) and publicizing successful Spanish and Portuguese voyages so as to encourage and inform English venturers and investors. Given the many and various ways in which Hakluyt’s work was read and translated on the continent, his making available of English narratives was equally risky, as Matthew Day points out. English relations with Spain were changing and the Principal Navigations, too, had to be calibrated to this, notoriously in the suppression soon after publication of the so-called “Cadiz leaves” describing Drake’s recent ambush of Cadiz harbour; only a handful of copies survive with the account intact. These new perspectives on the contradictory place of Spain in English writing intersect with what Barbara Fuchs has described as the “partial historicity” of English literary texts in their relation to Spain.[2] Far from polarizing English and Spanish culture, she argues, the emerging “imperial rivalry” between the two in fact encourages acts of appropriation, imitation and domestication of Spanish sources even in English texts most vigorously opposed to Spain.
A European context, too, is shown to inform even Hakluyt’s most jingoistic moments, and helps shed light on the question of motivation raised by his double-profession as a cleric and a travel writer. Hakluyt supported the notion of a providential English Protestant ability to trump the Spanish imperial model in evangelizing in the New World. That the Principal Navigations displays a “clearly Protestant, evangelical approach to religious diversity” (219) even despite its surprising lack of explicit religious commentary is Matthew Dimmock’s contention in exploring Hakluyt’s treatment of other faiths. The argument for the pre-eminence of Hakluyt’s spiritual convictions propelling his self-appointed editorial task garners support from David Harris Sacks’s brilliant exploration of the scriptural allusions so deeply embedded in Hakluyt’s work. Pirillo’s essay, too, supports Sacks’s reading, especially as Sacks tracks another fascinating expression of Hapsburg Spain’s imperial ambitions witnessed by Hakluyt’s Englishmen: not the famous Plus ultra motto, but a more recent development of it following Philip II’s succession to the crown of Portugal, Non Sufficit Orbis (“the world is not enough”). To face this expression of superbia, overweening Spanish pride, was to be assured of the superiority of England’s more moderate, and (for Sacks) more spiritual imperial ambitions.
Certainly, from the 1580s onward, Hakluyt’s fellow-clerics were not shy about pronouncing on the need for English mercantile voyages to be led by spiritual and even evangelical concerns rather than by economic or political ones. (In practice, of course, this evangelical ideology helped sustain the commercial and political.) In his 1587 tract on the “baptizing of a Turke,” Meredith Hanmer expostulated that “If wee were so desirous to haue our lights […] so shine vp on the earth in these North partes of the world, where Christianitie is professed, as we are gredily bent to gette the earthly commodities of Affrike, Asia, and the hid treasures of the far Indies, we shoulde no doubt prouoke them out of the said cou[n]tries to seek after our God, and to bee rauished with the conuersation and steppes of the Christians, as they allure vs wyth fame of their commodities, to seeke after their forrain riches” (sig. A4v). Or, in the 1597 dedicatory epistle to his employer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Abraham Hartwell used his translation of Duarte Lopes’s account of the Congo to plead with his countrymen that “such valiant English as do earnestly thirst and desire to achieve the conquest of rude and barbarous Nations … doo not attempt those actions for commodity of Gold or Siluer and for other transitorie or worldly respects, but that they would first seek the Kingdome of God & the saluation of many thousand soules, which the common enemy of mankynd still detayneth in ignorance.” (Hartwell’s coat of arms appeared on the frontispiece to the English translation of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s travel writings in 1598, which Hakluyt had helped into print.) And yet, as Sacks shows, Hakluyt’s “distinctly progressive view of history as godly rule itself […] spread throughout the world” (209) directly demands the support of English enterprises in Virginia. As a sample of this collection’s reach far beyond Hakluyt, we need look no further than the way in which these essays cumulatively complicate standard accounts of the nature and rhetoric of Anglo-Spanish competition, and how they re-conceive the spiritual-mercantile rationale behind such proto-“imperial” work.
The collection as a whole succeeds in showing both the range and depth of this English “imperial propagandist’s” European context, and challenges the primarily English political focus of work on Hakluyt by David Armitage and Richard Helgerson, for example.[3] But its individual essays vary in their methods and assumptions. There is some inconsistency in conceptualizing how Hakluyt addresses English projects in Virginia, for example: while the editors sensibly stick with the term “promoting,” the more loaded term “propaganda” recurs in several of the essays. Only David A. Boruchoff reflects on the implications of using this language, and his point that “the Protestant cause was also, more fundamentally, propaganda in the strict sense: an instrument for the propagation and teaching of spiritual and moral principles” (195) is well made. Happily, the present collection does not follow in Hakluyt’s footsteps in trusting to words alone. As with other Hakluyt Society publications, a generous selection of images, both color and black-and-white, helpfully connect this work to more familiar images of Europe and the New World. Thus we encounter once again the infamous de Bry images of the Algonquian nation included in the 1590 edition of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of … Virginia, modelled on John White’s watercolour drawings, which Mancall usefully reads alongside the illustrations to the 1598 English translation of Linschoten’s Itinerario. Mancall shows the more decisively promotional character of these publications and Hakluyt’s increasing belief in the importance of establishing English settlements in North America.
Readers’ individual preferences will always come into play with a subject as rich as Hakluyt and travel writing, some seeking one emphasis, others another. For my part, the collection’s strong focus on Hakluyt’s promotion of New World ventures, especially the Virginia colony, comes at the expense of attention to Hakluyt’s anthologizing of English and other European writing on the Old World of the near and far east, and to considerations of how these worlds fit alongside each other in his projects. Again, I wished the collection could be even longer than its 369 pages (surely Hakluyt would approve?) so as to bring Hakluyt’s first readers more clearly into view. Jowitt’s survey of attitudes to travel collections evidenced by four Elizabethan and Jacobean plays testifies to a broad familiarity with Hakluyt in London, but what constituencies those were, and how instrumentally or spiritually or politically they read the Principal Navigations, remains unclear. The readings of a Cecil or a Purchas do come through, but what about the access and responses of those who saw Volpone at the Globe Theatre in 1606, or The Antipodes at the Salisbury Court theatre in the late 1630s? This is a challenging task, of course, and one that may yet be addressed in the volumes of the forthcoming Oxford edition of the Principal Navigations. Until then, there are enough exciting new directions, arguments and ideas about Hakluyt’s place in English and European culture in the present collection to engage any armchair traveler.
Jane Grogan
University College, Dublin
Table of Contents
Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt, Introduction
Section I Hakluyt in Context
Anthony Payne, Hakluyt’s London: Discovery and Overseas Trade
Joan-Pau Rubiés, From the “History of Travayle” to the History of Travel Collections: The Rise of an Early Modern Genre
Section II Early Modern Travel Collections
Margaret Small, A World Seen through Another’s Eyes: Hakluyt, Ramusio, and the Narratives of the Navigationi et Viaggi
Sven Trakulhun, Three Tales of the New World: Nation, Religion, and Colonialism in Hakluyt, de Bry, and Hulsius
Grégoire Holtz, Hakluyt in France: Pierre Bergeron and Travel Writing Collections
Matthew Day, “Honour to our Nation”: Nationalism, The Principal Navigations and Travel Collections in the Long Eighteenth Century
Peter C. Mancall, Richard Hakluyt and the Visual World of Early Modern Travel Narratives
Section III Editorial Practices
Joyce Lorimer, “[T]ouching the state of the Country of Guiana, and whether it were fit to be planted by the English”: Sir Robert Cecil, Richard Hakluyt and the Writing of Guiana, 1595–1612
Nandini Das, Richard Hakluyt’s Two Indias: Textual sparagmos and Editorial Practice
Julia Schleck, Forming the Captivity of Thomas Saunders: Hakluyt’s Editorial Practices and their Ideological Effects
Colm MacCrossan, Framing “the English nation”: Reading between Text and Paratext in The Principal Navigations (1598–1600)
Felicity Stout, “The strange and wonderfull Discoverie of Russia”: Hakluyt and Censorship
Section IV Allegiances and Ideologies: Politics, Religion, Nation
Francisco J. Borge, “We (upon peril of my life) shall make the Spaniard ridiculous to all Europe”: Richard Hakluyt’s “Discourse” of Spain
Diego Pirillo, Balance of Power and Freedom of the Seas: Richard Hakluyt and Alberico Gentili
David A. Boruchoff, Richard Hakluyt and the Demands of Pietas Patriae
David Harris Sacks, “To deduce a colonie”: Richard Hakluyt’s Godly Mission in its Contexts, c.1580–1616
Matthew Dimmock, Hakluyt’s Multiple Faiths
Section V Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing
Mary C. Fuller, “His dark materials”: The Problem of Dullness in Hakluyt’s Collections
Bernhard Klein, “To pot straight way we goe”: Robert Baker in Guinea, 1562–64
Daniel Carey, Hakluyt, Purchas, and the Romance of Virginia
Elizabeth Heale, “Accidentall restraints”: Straits and Passages in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations
Steve Mentz, Hakluyt’s Oceans: Maritime Rhetoric in The Principal Navigations
Claire Jowitt, Hakluyt’s Legacy: Armchair Travel in English Renaissance Drama
Coda
Roy Bridges, The Legacy of Richard Hakluyt: Reflections on the History of the Hakluyt Society
Works Cited
Index
[1] Following the editors I use the spelling of the second edition (Principal Navigations) rather than the first (Principall Navigations) throughout to refer to Hakluyt’s entire project in that work.
[2] Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
[3] David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
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